Dean's World

We ought to train and arm the exile community. I bet tens of thousands would volunteer to liberate their homeland.

BTW Dean, yur first link is wrong.

Yep, we ought to do it right this time. We're not bound by promises made to the Soviets.

Hell, all they needed last time was air cover.

I give Kennedy an A for idealism, F for execution.

On two successive winters in the early 1990's, Stefi and I visited Key West, and like a lot of other tourists, stood at the foot of the large cylindrical yellow-painted concrete slab that marks the southernmost land of the continental United States, with Havana, Cuba just 90 miles southward. I didn't think on this very much in those years, along with a lot of other Americans.

Lately, I have given thought to what could be considered an absurd situation. Since January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro's militia swept him into power as head of a communist dictatorship in Havana, the United States has engaged our armed forces or assisted our surrogates in major bloody wars to free all kinds of peoples from totalitarian rule.

And we did so regardless of any question of whether the majority of the peoples are young men and women were sent out to help even wanted our involvement in their affairs. But intervene everwhere we did; with the sole exception of the communist gangster regime on that island whose capital is only 90 miles south of Key West, Florida.

In a truly ironic sense, we did in fact intervene in the affairs of the Cuban nation. Not to free them, however, but to help enslave them. Who was responsible for recruiting, training, arming and transporting to their death and capture the 1400 some brave fighters of Brigada de Asalto 2506 in the spring of 1961, then desert them -- our soldiers -- by dumping them on the wrong shoreline at the dead of night, then deny them the vital air support that would have flattened Castro's new air force and would have given the Cubans a chance to get their heavy weapons and ammunition ashore so they could equip a proper defense perimeter? Eisenhower's administration set them up for the sucker punch. Kennedy's administration delivered it.

Then, just 18 months later, John F Kennedy secretly negotiated with Nikita Sergeievich Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, and treacherously agreed to offer Castro immunity from any further effort by exiled Cubans to liberate their own country. Thus, sealing the fate of the unfortunate islanders to endure more than a generation of no political freedom at all, economic poverty bordering on starvation, society-wide mismanagement of virtual every aspect of life dominated by the Castro gang; and now, the young women and young men of the island being all but openly encouraged to practice prostitution with foreign tourists for purposes of accumulating foreign currency that cuban Communism can never earn through any honest or decent endeavor.

Based on that record, you're damned right we have been intervening in their affairs.

So, I say that time has come to assist the Cuban nation to rid itself of the corrupt, incompetent, but always power-hungry gang that has looted the lives, property, family relationships and even their present, and of their future, if this deadly farce is allowed to continue.

The fact is, this country has a moral obligation to do all of the above. Governments of the United States from the time of president McKinley in the late 18th century have intervened in Cuba's political affairs, and almost continuously in their economy. Why did we cease that when the latest Cuban dictator was a communist conspirator, aided and assisted by his crazed, hate-filled and murderous Argentinian revolutionary Ernesto Guevara? Why have we allowed domestic leftists in this country for almost 50 years now to hide the true and unchanging nature of the Communism that took root in Cuba?

I understand that there are Americans who would feel diffident about assisting the Cuban exiles to crush communism on their home island during the geriontocracy of Fidel Castro. But if not now, then when? And if not us, then whom?

If the dictatorship in Cuba has protected status until that man's death, then I think the United States government should begin immediately by making active plans to assist the Cuban people -- both those on the island and those who were forced to leave -- in a direct campaign to liberate their island, no later than the very moment of the dictator's death.

And I think the United States should announce to the entire world that we will guarantee freedom for the Cuban nation, regardless of any machinations from any combination of members of the now-discredited United Nations Organization (UNO), and regardless of any connections the Castro gang has made with China or any other country to sustain their system under Castro's aging brother Raul, or any others not voted into power in a fair election.

If and when we do this, the power of the United States will recover a measure of authority all across this world that we have not truly had since those years from 1959 through 1962, when two successive US presidents allowed the communist dictator to establish his bloody and oppressive rule in a place just 90 miles from a yellow concrete cylindrical monument that marks the southernmost tip of the continental United States.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

SMA, you are totally correct. I had neglected to consider the even longer-term aspects of US historical relationships with the former colonial possessions of Spain, Portugal and other European powers, once the peoples of these countries had liberated themselves from colonial rule.

That makes our debt to cuban freedom even more overdue than it already is.

By the way. I freely admit I had rarely in the past given much thought to Cuba and the Cubans, other than to allow to fester a marked prejudice against them, generated solely from the attitudes that many of us acquired when considering the problems or potentials of the iberian new world republics in general and the caribbean republics in particular.

I now see that was to no small degree a mistaken attitude. Because I held it mainly based on commonly assumed reputation rather than on fact. I have no begun rectifying all that, by taking steps to immerse myself in the history and even of some of the culture of Cuba and its people. Not the communist culture foisted upon them by Castro, his little brother, Ernesto Guevara, and their army of henchmen over almost 50 years, but by the culture of the real Cuban people, which I think can re-emerge after the Castro gang bites the dust.

In any case, regardless of what any of us -- including me -- think of their culture, they deserve liberty the same as do you and I. And I intend to argue incessantly and everywhere on behalf of that principle. After the treachery of John F Kennedy that fateful day in the spring of 1961, with that brigade that we abandoned on the cuban shore, we owe at least that much to the Cuban nation, most of which now wishes, I am certain, to be free.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI