South Florida Sun Sentinel, February 3, 2021
Look closer at Cuba
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| Fidel Castro in Addis Ababa with Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1977. |
William M. LeoGrande makes a number of claims that do not stand up to closer scrutiny. [”Biden should act fast on Cuba | Opinion,” Jan. 28] He called President Obama’s 2014 opening “a historic achievement.” The opening was followed by a collapse in U.S. trade with Cuba, a historic increase in repression against Cuban dissidents, and beginning in November 2016, American diplomats suffering brain injuries. The cause, according to the National Academies of Sciences, is “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed, radiofrequency energy.”
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| Mengistu visits Cuba in Havana,Cuba on May 1, 1978. |
LeoGrande’s claim that engagement with Cuba “was necessary for ending the conflict in southern Africa in the 1980s” fails to mention that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s drove the end of conflict in southern Africa with the end of Soviet subsidies. It was not the good offices of the Castro regime.
The professor ignores the role played by the Castro brothers in the late 1970s and early 1980s in Ethiopia, sending thousands of Cuban troops to assist war criminal Mengistu Haile Mariam carry out a genocide that claimed over a million Ethiopian lives. When formulating policy it is important to provide full context. The Castro regime has been and continues to be a bad actor, and belongs on the list of state terror sponsors.
The Biden administration should take its time in formulating an effective policy.
John Suarez, executive director, Center for a Free Cuba
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Fidel Castro sent troops to Angola without consulting the Kremlin, but Soviet support for the MPLA meant that Ford, Carter, and Reagan all saw the Cuban intervention in Angola as part of a bid by the USSR for greater influence in the developing world.
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