[lit-ideas] Re: Adios, amigo.

I've also been an admirer (with the caveat you include). Have you read Jonathan Kozol's book about the literacy campaign in Cuba? 'Each one, teach one' was the slogan used to get thousands of city kids out into the country to teach reading. Inspiring stuff. From Bush we get, 'don't let the terrorists keep you from shopping'. Perilous days coming for Cuba. 
Ursula
North Bay, Ontario

Mike Geary wrote:
I know I said I was on vacation, and I am, but I had to stick my head back in the door just to wish my old amigo Castro adios. I wish like hell that he had been more tolerant of dissent, but he wasn't. He was, however, unbelievably successful at telling the US to go fuck itself and getting away with it for 50 years. Ever since Kennedy's colossally stupid mistake of taking the advice of McNamara and Rusk to follow through on Eisenhower's plan to invade Cuba with a rag-tag band of exiles (after all the CIA assured him that the population would rise up and join the invaders)and the subsequent fiasco -- ever since then, Castro has been my hero. He was no friend of freedom, it's true, but he was a thorn in the side of the U S war mongers for 50 years. I celebrate that. Except for the matter of political liberty -- a very important matter, mind you -- he built a good, just and equitable society in Cuba. Something this country has failed to do in two hundred plus years. And he did it 90 miles off the shore of the most formidable military power in the history of the world, a power that would go into paroxysms and foam at the mouth whenever it thought about him. For that, I salute him. Maybe now that Castro has stepped aside (having stepped over the graves of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and over the machinations of Carter, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II), maybe now our petty, petulant little leaders can forgo their obsession with "communism" and drop the execrable economic embargo and get down to serious trade negotiations with Cuba. Let Cuba be Cuba. We desperately need to learn how to make a just society -- they can probably help us greatly in that. And maybe we can show them the way to democratic institutions if they're interested. In addition we would be providing our domestic markets with a rich source of 1950 era Chevys, and major league ball players. Carry on, 
Mike Geary
Memphis

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