Word: cuba
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...change was bad news for the U.S.; Castro's regime (and American attempts to eliminated it) prompted the Bay of Pigs debacle, closed off a beautiful country with a vibrant music culture, and - possibly worst of all - triggered a 46-year-old trade embargo that has deprived Americans of Cuba's most prized export: its vaunted cigars...
...Lula da Silva - who is the head of Brazil's Workers Party and supposedly the Castros' leftist soulmate - is perhaps Latin America's most acclaimed capitalist leader. Capitalism's excesses get deservedly excoriated for causing today's global catastrophe. But even Venezuela, which helps prop up Cuba's economy with cut-rate oil, has made it clear in recent elections that it's not the socialist hotbed that its left-wing President Hugo Chávez dreams of. Yes, the hypocritical drill among Latin leaders is that they censure Washington publicly but Havana privately. Still, most of them believe Cuba...
...that the Cuban revolution doesn't deserve its due. It overthrew one of Latin America's most putrid dictators, championed the poor (still a rare thing to do in Latin America) and showed the U.S. that its worst Monroe Doctrine impulses (not to mention the Mafia that was overrunning Cuba then) could be thwarted. People buy Che Guevara T shirts for more than just the lefty chic. The Miami exiles (many of whom backed Fidel Castro before he went communist) deserve their props too, despite the Elian Gonzalez mess. Most were not corrupt oligarchs and gusanos (worms, as Fidel Castro...
...point is that both sides have got to learn to give a little. Last year, when TIME put Raúl Castro on its list of the world's 100 most influential people - because he had taken over for Fidel Castro as interim President and looked to be moving Cuba in a more pragmatic direction - the magazine got scorn from U.S. officials. This year, when TIME put Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez on the list - for the impact she's had on political blogging around the world - Cuban officials complained in turn. They're entitled to their opinion, but both camps...
...they could also spend this century on the hemisphere's sidelines. The destroyer Admiral Chabanenko just visited Havana for five days - the first Russian warship to dock there since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 - and it symbolized to many how low U.S. influence has sunk in the Caribbean. Cuba, meanwhile, was invited this month to a regional summit in Brazil from which the U.S. was excluded - a reminder that Latin Americans still see U.S. treatment of Cuba as a reflection of how the U.S. treats them...