Word: castros
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fidel Castro was once the particular pet of Europe's non-Communist left. Lately, however, El Jefe has come under increasing attack from his erstwhile admirers for his administrative failures and his increasing reliance upon Moscow, which keeps some 30,000 "advisers" in Cuba to help run things. Last week Fidel was smarting as a result of the most intense criticism to date from leftist intellectuals for his Soviet-style crackdown on a Cuban poet named Heberto Padilla...
...some time Padilla's verse was allowed to circulate freely, even after his critical stance toward the regime had begun to attract attention abroad. But he ran into major trouble in 1968, when an international panel of leftist intellectuals assembled by Castro's government awarded Cuba's national poetry prize to Out of the Game, a collection of Padilla's verse that had been banned by the regime as "revolutionarily unfit." One poem suggested that anyone who wanted to get along in the new Communist Cuba should learn...
Under Torture. Last March Padilla was arrested without charges and thrown into dank Campo Libertad, a prison in Havana. In a letter to Castro, a group of prominent intellectuals (among them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Moravia and Carlos Fuentes) protested. But what got him out, five weeks later, were his own words. Padilla abjectly confessed to "a series of insults and defamations against the revolution, which are now-and always will be-my shame." He accused European leftist Writers K.S. Karol and René Dumont, who recently published critical studies of Castro's regime (TIME...
...Juan Arcocha, an old friend of Padilla's who now lives in France, insists that the poet's "selfcriticism could have been signed in only one way: under torture." That is unproven, but one thing is beyond dispute. Padilla's evidently forced recantation only further estranged Castro from his quondam admirers. "The pit between Cuba's leaders and the non-Communist European or Latin American Left is being dug deeper," wrote Marcel Niedergang, a longtime friend and supporter of Castro, in France's Le Monde. For his part, Fidel turned his big-bore verbal artillery...
CUBA has trained some 2,500 Latin American guerrillas during the past decade. In addition, the Cubans have sent military instructors to Algeria and to the Congo-Brazzaville. Despite Fidel Castro's tough words two weeks ago about aligning himself with the "revolutionary peoples of the world," Cuba's training program has been somewhat curtailed in the post-Che Guevara period. While still capable of exploiting regional trouble spots, the Cubans have lately been preoccupied with economic problems at home and have been inhibited by the fact that leftist movements in many Latin American countries are splintered...