Word: cuba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when Fidel Castro launched his first rebel assault and when Kim Il Sung began building his ghost republic), and both are further hemmed in by their commitment to guerrilla leaders who really did help to free their people from foreign domination. Yet beneath those surface similarities, North Korea and Cuba are as different as Doctor Strangelove and Doctor Zhivago, as different as a made-to-order Stalinist dystopia where not a thought is out of place and an unruly Caribbean island that is the stuff of Marx's nightmares. In North Korea the government tells every citizen what to wear...
Those geopoliticians who have been hungering for an aftermath to the cold war -- a tragicomic sequel -- have been richly rewarded over this summer, as two of the last stalwarts of communism, North Korea and Cuba, have rattled their rhetorical sabers, flourished their poker hands and roared their threats into the wind. Though both of them have something of the air of those Japanese soldiers lost in the Southeast Asian jungle and unaware that the war they have been fighting was concluded long ago, both also have the desperate -- and therefore dangerous -- recklessness of isolated dictatorships whose coffers are close...
...trips to Cuba, by contrast, have brought home to me only that the country's agony lies in its proximity to the world. Nearly everyone in Cuba has close relatives in the U.S., 90 miles away, and the opportunity, increasingly, to meet (and mate) with visitors from Toronto and Madrid. Fidel Castro, if only out of shrewdness, has decreed that no school or street may be named after the living (hence Che Guevara is ubiquitous), and insofar as he has developed a personality cult, has done so mostly by default: revealing almost nothing about himself, and letting speculation...
What this means is that Cuba, at least to some extent, is on our wavelength, as the Hermit Kingdom never could be. Castro has eaten hot dogs at Yankee Stadium, been carried by cheering students around the Princeton campus and appeared on the Tonight Show. Though none of that ensures affection and all those memories are distant, someone who spent his honeymoon in New York City knows at least a little of America. Kim Jong Il, by comparison, is famous as the one leader who may never have met an American. And, being unable to put a face...
Meetings in Madrid last night and this morning between Cuba's foreign minister and leaders of the Cuban exile community in the U.S. could lead to "concrete political changes," the exiles said. The talks between Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina and the leaders, first reported by TIME Daily yesterday, marked Fidel Castro's first recognition of his opposition during three decades in power. Robaina met with Ramon Cernuda of the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and Reconciliation, Alfredo Duran, a Cuban-born former chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and longtime Miami-area political activist, and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo...