Word: commissars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Economic Commissar. With the shakeup, the form of the Castro government, months in the shaping, came clear. Fidel Castro, who helicopters about the country dispensing largesse from the blue National Bank checkbook he always carries in his breast pocket, is political chief. His pony-tailed brother Raul is military boss, commanding the 35,000-man rebel army that is the regime's principal arm of force and terror, notably for rounding up all suspected oppositionists on a charge of "counterrevolution" (last week's bag: 250 prisoners...
Guevara, a slim asthmatic who keeps a glass inhalator close at hand, becomes the country's economic commissar (while holding onto his auxiliary job as commander of Havana's Cabana Fortress). The son of an Argentine Communist mother, Guevara got his M.D. in Buenos Aires, then decided that "curing nations is more exciting than curing people." He turned up in Red-lining Guatemala of the early 1950s, where the man who was instructed to hire him as an inspector in the Agrarian Department remembers only that Che was identified as a "Communist from abroad." With this sinecure...
...polkas, waltzes and 19th century Russian ballroom dances that the Czar's court once favored. President Kliment Voroshilov forgot his 78 years to sail off across the floor with Ekaterina Furtseva, the only woman member of the ruling Presidium. Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan flashed gaily around with one commissar's wife after another. It was a long way from the barricades...
...founding of the Communist Party and the Long March might have put Liu far down the list of party hopefuls. Yet when he finally reached Mao's Yenan headquarters in 1937, he quickly made up for lost time, moved nimbly through the party infighting. As a political commissar, he was assigned to investigate the army commanded by grizzled Peng Teh-huai, the Reds' No. 2 military man and later commander of Chinese "volunteers" in Korea...
...Bonjour, Commissar." Along the way, Soustelle came to share Latin American outcries about Yankee imperialism ("Even that which Americans do with good intention becomes tainted because there is such a difference in psychology"), and developed so strong a left-wing slant that when he joined the Free French in 1940, a right-wing Gaullist received him with the sour greeting: "Bonjour, Commissar." Like most other French leftists, Soustelle supported Socialist Leon Blum's prewar Popular Front with the Communists. In Mexico one of his great friends was Communist Painter Diego Rivera, who was at that time, Soustelle recalls...