Word: castros
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Homecomings of all sorts for Castro's legions
They descended to a "heroes' welcome" that was everything public ceremonies in Cuba usually are not: brief, somber and quiet. An artillery corps band belted out a few revolutionary hymns, and women militia members goose-stepped across the tarmac of Jose Marti Airport. But President Fidel Castro, attired in tailored green fatigues, his beard noticeably gray, said not a word in public. He simply shook hands with the wounded, who apparently had been told to say nothing; several seemed too dazed to speak in any case, and one barely conscious man on a stretcher failed to recognize the Cuban...
...subdued mood was appropriate to the occasion in more ways than one. The U.S. invasion of Grenada and the execution of Marxist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop that preceded and helped trigger the U.S. move have dealt Castro's influence in Central America and the Caribbean Basin a greater blow than any events since the missile crisis...
Only four years ago, when Cuban-allied governments came to power almost simultaneously in Nicaragua and Grenada, Castro's clout seemed to be on the rise. But an erosion began the next year when voters in Jamaica elected conservative Edward Seaga to succeed leftist Michael Manley, a Castro ally, as Prime Minister. Jamaica has now swung so strongly against Cuba that Seaga sent troops to assist in the invasion of Grenada and last week expelled the last semiofficial Cuban on the island, a correspondent for the Cuban news service Prensa Latina. Seaga charged that the correspondent had participated with...
Trying to pick up the pieces, Castro resorted to a propaganda offensive. Beginning shortly after the invasion of Grenada, the Cuban government has been ferrying reporters and TV crews in from Miami by chartered plane for an unprecedented round of press conferences, communiques and briefings. The primary message at the moment is that Sir Paul Scoon, the Grenadian Governor General who represents Queen Elizabeth II, is a U.S. stooge, and any Grenadian government that might be set up with his help would be a puppet of Washington. Thus Cuban Vice Foreign Minister Ricardo Alarcdn last week sneered that "some...