Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second-largest city (pop. 360,000), a crowd of 5,000 carefully selected guests waited patiently as the country's aging revolutionary leadership filed into place on the carved wooden balconies of the venerable city hall. Soaked to the skin, the audience heard Army Chief Raúl Castro declare all of Santiago a "hero of the republic" and bestow upon the city Cuba's highest honor, the Order of Antonio Maceo. Then all eyes shifted to the central balcony, where President Fidel Castro, 56, stood alone, his head bowed. Stepping to the lectern, Castro used words...
Notably absent on this occasion was the kind of flamboyant improvisational rhetoric that Castro introduced to the world a quarter-century ago. The graying revolutionary jefe read from a prepared text for a mere 90 minutes-a brief span compared with the five-and six-hour Castro stemwinders of the past. In a detailed litany of the accomplishments of his Communist regime, Castro described Cuba's socialist state as "the most advanced political and social system known in the history of mankind...
...assessing the achievements of his prematurely middle-aged revolution, Castro takes special pride in its social benefits, particularly in the areas of public health care, education, public housing and nutrition. Some of Cuba's progress is indeed impressive. The country has one of the Third World's highest ratios of doctors to overall population (1 to 626 in 1980); Castro confidently predicted last week that within 15 to 20 years Cuba would lead the world in health-care delivery. Illiteracy has been virtually eliminated; Cuba's population now has an average educational level equivalent to junior high...
With that, Castro launched into venomous language to describe the No. 1 enemy of his revolution and, in his view, of mankind: the Reagan Administration and U.S. "imperialism." The U.S. leadership, said Castro, is composed of "new Nazi-fascist barbarians, blackmailers by nature, cowardly, opportunistic and calculating like their Hitlerian predecessors." The Reagan Administration, he charged, is pushing the world toward nuclear holocaust. Citing in particular the deployment of new U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, Castro declared that President Reagan's "warlike hysteria" would produce a "necessary and just response" from Cuba's main ally...
Above all, Castro singled out the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada. Referring to the 24 Cubans who died in the invasion, Castro declared to loud applause that "the blood shed by the heroic collaborators who fell in Grenada will never be forgotten." Nor, he said, would the Cuban revolution "tremble or vacillate" should the time come to defend itself. Harking back yet again to the Santiago triumph of 1959, Castro invoked the "heroism, patriotism and revolutionary spirit" of that day to achieve the same aim: "Victory...