Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have swept Cuba. The government admitted having placed 700 youngsters in state homes "at the children's request." As the parents' fear grew, many vowed to resist. At the town of Bayamo, 50 mothers signed a pact to kill their children rather than hand them over to Castro...
Concerned that his designs on Cuban youth might make the increasingly bold opposition even bolder (last week the regime announced that it had foiled a plot to assassinate Castro by arresting a dozen suspects), the Maximum Leader hurriedly branded the decree a forgery, jailed 14 persons, including a Havana printer, on charges of circulating it. "An absurd invention," said Castro blandly on TV. "Who would dream of such madness?" But many Cubans remained unconvinced-considering the course that Castro sails. As Lenin himself once said: "Revolution is impossible as long as the family exists...
...Veteran New York Timesman Herbert Lionel Matthews, 61, the big thrill came one February night four years ago in Cuba's Oriente province. Led there by intermediaries. Matthews sat for three 'hours with a bearded and gabby young guerrilla leader named Fidel Castro, puffing Havana cigars and discussing, in whispers, Castro's plans to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The rendezvous with Castro did indeed produce an impressive scoop. Until Matthews' three-part series appeared in the Times, much of the world had been led to believe Castro dead, his rebel movement aborted. In Matthews...
...Matthews can be proud of in his continued coverage of Cuba. Dazzled from the start by the dashing revolutionary ("I was moved, deeply moved, by that young man"), Matthews fell into the trap that everywhere awaits the unwary reporter: he let emotional bias suspend his judgment. In his eyes. Castro became a hero of whom Matthews can still write today, as he does in The Cuban Story: "I could never bring myself to condemn Fidel Castro outright for what he has done ... I see what is good about [the revolution], how important it is. and I retain my sympathy...
...plenty of evidence suggested that Matthews1 admiration was misplaced. But the Timesman, a longtime student of Latin American affairs, apparently did not bother to examine it. "Let us note in passing." he writes in The Cuban Story, "that already in 1948, at the age of 21, Fidel Castro was anti-Yankee and agitating against 'Yankee imperialism.' " But in his first story in the Times, Matthews let Castro say, without rebuttal, that "We have no animosity toward the United States and the American people...