Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Crimson reported this event, quoting two undergraduate bystanders. One compared Castro favorably to Batista, not only contradicting the testimony of those at the rally who had bought both dictators, but also obscuring the main theme of the meeting. The Cuban people want neither Castro nor Batista. They demand freedom. However, that commentator, long a servant of Soviet aggression as head of the Peace Alliance and the ElSalvador Committee, seems unfamiliar with the desire for democracy, and his statement is thus not surprising...
...Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), 53, complained after a hasty departure from his basement apartment in Bogota last month. Fearing a secret warrant for his arrest, the novelist and journalist fled to Mexico after Colombia had broken relations with Cuba and his personal friend Fidel Castro. The regime claims that the leading surrealist was merely trying to embarrass them by seeking refuge in the Mexican embassy in Colombia. But Garcia Marquez says, "I am shy and I look aggressive." Some countrymen offer a more illuminating possibility: He's got an electric typewriter...
...tung made a big splash in 1966, when at age 72 he reportedly swam nine miles down the Yangtze River. Then Rumania's Party Boss Nicolae Ceauşescu made hunting history in 1978 by bagging the largest bear ever shot in Europe. Now it appears that Fidel Castro too can boast of a fancy feat. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, he is said to have shot down singlehanded an American U-2 plane...
That is what Carlos Franqui, a Cuban emigre writer living in Italy, contends in Family Portrait, a chronicle of the Castro years to be published in Spain next month. According to Franqui, an old Castro comrade who left Cuba years ago in anger over Moscow's increasing influence, the incident occurred Oct. 27, 1962, at the height of the U.S.Soviet confrontation over the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. On that day, the Cuban President was visiting a Soviet missile base in Pinar del Rio, southwest of Havana. When a U-2 appeared on the base's radar...
...would Castro have fired the missile? Franqui writes that Castro went to the base "with intent" to create an incident that would tell him if "there was going to be a war or not." While the U-2 downing was no secret, there has never been any hint before that Castro fired the missile, nor any corroboration now of the Franqui version. U.S. intelligence officials find Franqui's account "intriguing" but point out that if Castro did push the button, the SA-2 would not have hit the plane unless the Soviets had already been tracking it on radar...