Travel letters: Tourists’-eye-view of Cuba — it’s a great place

I am politely protesting the information in Catharine Hamm’s article “For Now, Cuba Is for the Adventurous Sort” (On the Spot, Feb. 1). I am especially talking abut Joe Diaz’s words describing Cuba as “raw.”

You do not have to be too adventurous to go. As a 67-year-old woman, I backpacked around Cuba alone for six weeks, finding transportation, food and lodging easy to acquire.

Why not have an “adventurer’s” point of view?

Ghosha Maffei

Granada Hills

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So disappointed in Hamm’s misleading article about Cuba.

She didn’t mention the most wonderful thing about a Cuban adventure — the Cuban people, their kindness and honesty.

One of us left his wallet in a cab. When we returned to our hotel after fabulous gallery shopping, our cab driver was there waiting for us so he could return the wallet, with everything in it.

Also, new regulations allow tourists to spend up to $400 per trip, including $100 on cigars. Art is excluded from the limit. All I can say is: Hurry!

Sally Silvers

Los Angeles

WWII bombing

Regarding the letter (Feb. 1) that said of Winston Churchill, “even great men have the capacity to be evil.” No doubt that the writer’s mother and millions of other Germans (and Japanese) were innocent victims of the Allied Bomber Command during World War II, but as the writer wrote, Churchill thought the destruction of German cities would hasten Germany’s surrender.

Can we say that he was wrong?

And what were his options?

The sooner the war ended, the sooner the overall killing would stop.

Churchill owed it to the English people to attempt to end the war as soon as possible. His individual decisions might have involved faulty judgment (the bombing of Dresden was particularly questionable), but to say that the man who was more responsible than any other human being for saving the world from Hitler and his truly evil gang of thugs was himself culpable of evil (because of this decision) is shortsighted and unjustified.

The amount of evil that would have continued to occur in the world but for men such as Churchill dwarfs the unfortunate fate that befell the writer’s mother and other civilians caught in the collateral damage of the war.

John Sibbison

Torrance

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News space and good taste make it difficult for an Englishman to respond to the insinuation that it was the British that determined to kill German civilians to hasten the war’s end.

As a kid in London, I well recall the 1,000 American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers that blackened the sky on their way to Germany.

It was Hitler’s idea to kill tens of thousands of British civilians in 1941 so as to destroy our resolve to resist the Nazis. That’s three years before the raids on Germany.

John Schueler

Oceanside