Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Havana in addition is preparing Cuban and world opinion for the possibility that some Cuban prisoners in Grenada might defect to the U.S. That has not happened yet, but Castro evidently fears it will and is seeking to soften the blow by dismissing any defections in advance as the result of U.S. psychological coercion. A government communique charges that American interrogators are "using every possible means to undermine the morale" of the prisoners, telling them that Cuba does not want them back and offering them political asylum...
Internally, as the airport ceremony for the wounded demonstrated, Castro is appealing to patriotic fervor rather than revolutionary enthusiasm to maintain his hold on the populace. There is, in fact, little of the old guerrilla spirit left in Cuba: like Castro, the revolution has gone middle-aged and gray. Visitors to Havana are struck by the similarity to most Communist countries: a rigid bureaucracy, a once lively press that is now dismissed even by sympathetic leftists as boring, buildings that are shabbily maintained...
Another factor that dismays even some leftists visiting Cuba is the extent to which Castro has militarized the nation. The official force of 127,500 is one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere, but that is only the beginning. Estimates of the number of Cuban troops (usually called "military advisers") stationed in Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia and South Yemen range from 33,000 to 61,000; almost 7,000 Cuban civilians are believed to be in those countries too. At home, Castro plans to double the size of the territorial militia from the 1981 count...
Ostensibly the mobilization is designed to deter the U.S. invasion that Castro regularly warns against in time of crisis. Its real motive is probably to instill enough patriotic feeling to draw the people closer to Castro. If so, it has worked. Says a Latin American diplomat in Havana: "As long as Fidel is around, support for the government will be strong. The people adore him. When they are unhappy with the government, they say, 'Many things happen that the commandante en jefe [commander in chief] doesn't know about...
Officials in Washington are quick to warn that Castro's potential for international troublemaking should not be discounted. They expect future Cuban ventures to be more cautious than the attempt to take over Grenada, which apparently went further and faster than Castro intended; American officials doubt Castro wanted Bishop killed. The Cubans, says a State Department official, "always try hard to keep below the threshold of our tolerance, and they were in Grenada until their threshold fell out from under them." But U.S. diplomats fully expect the Cubans to continue striving for regional influence. Says one: "They lost something...