| [ USA ] in KIDS 글 쓴 이(By): 구르미 (구르미) 날 짜 (Date): 2008년 2월 20일 수요일 오전 05시 56분 09초 제 목(Title): On Cuba http://tinyurl.com/2chtq5 Taken from the posts of NY Times blog. ------ As a student of Cuba (I'm completing an anthology of Cuban poetry to be published next year)I am deeply ambivalent about Castro. Nonetheless, a couple of sentences in the Times article seem to me to require comment: "But he soon turned his back on those democratic ideals, embraced a totalitarian brand of communism and allied the island with the Soviet Union. He brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in the fall of 1962, when he allowed Russia to build missile launching sites just 90 miles off the American shores. He weathered an American-backed invasion and used Cuban troops to stir up revolutions in Africa and Latin America. Those actions earned him the permanent enmity of Washington and led the United States to impose decades of economic sanctions that Mr. Castro and his followers maintain have crippled Cuba economy and have kept their socialist experiment from succeeding completely." The events are reversed, and that reversal creates a false narrative. The US embargo was imposed in 1960. It was follwed by the Bay of Pigs invasion. The installation of the missles, and a deepening of ties between Cuba and the Soviet Union followed chronologically, and were a consequence. The invasion had merely reinforced Cuban memory of previous US invasions, and perhaps more critically, of the overthrow of the benign, democratic government of Guatemala in 1954. If the Cuban regime was paranoid, it nonetheless knew that it had enemies. As to the castro regime's stirring up revolutions in Africa, I assume the allusion is to the war in Angola. The United States and the then-apartheid government of South Africa hasd in fact stirred up a revolution there against a legitimate government by backing the otherwise negligible force of Jonas Savimbi. This was a civil war of our creation. The Cubans sent troops, but so did South Africa. It was the defeat of South Africa that put one of the final nails in the coffin of the apartheid regime. By the way, the Times has a picture of Castro in the "SIerra Maestro." That's "Sierra Maestre." Proofreading is a sign of caring about details. Mark � Mark Weiss, New York |