Word: cuban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...STRANGEST witness to appear before the Watergate Committee on summer television was Bernard Barker, charged with recruiting the Cuban exiles who actually performed the burglary. Unrepentant, he seized the chance to justify the operation, but his speech was like stills from a film of the early 60s; he talked of his love for Cuba, of his memories of the Bay of Pigs invasion, of our duty to the Cubans we had promised to set free. But the rest of the United States has managed to forget the years devoted to crushing the "Communist island within ninety miles of our territory...
...surprising that only now, so long after he left Cuba, has Guillermo Cabrera Infante published Vista Del Amanecer en el Tropico, (View of Dawn in the Tropics), his denunciation of the Cuban Revolution. Surprisingly, because it took so long for such a beautiful damnation to arrive from the Cuban opposition and because despite the passage of time, this book is as bitter as though its writer had left the island yesterday. Cabrera Infante has been an opponent of the Cuban government since he left the island in the early sixties. Like many exiles, he supported Castro at the beginning...
Vista del Amanecer, Cabrera's newest statement, published in 1974, is a grimly serious book, soaked with desperate humor. It is a collection of short pieces, difficult to define, few of them more than a page long, meditations on images in Cuban history. At worst they resemble Reader's Digest fillers, but at their best they are epiphanies. Each one presents a static image or a brief moment. To explain the colonial period, for example, they describe engravings: conquistadores meeting Indians, bloodhounds catching a runaway slave...
Cuba has contributed a number of inventions to the progress of warfare and repression. The Spaniards bred the slavehunting dogs, "Cuban hounds", that were exported to the United States. Spanish generals invented the system of concentrating a rural population in garrisons and declaring anyone outside them a rebel that the United States would employ in Vietnam under the name of "strategic hamlets" policy. Cuban revolutionaries refined the techniques of urban terrorism as far back...
Cabrera attacks the Cuban revolution simply by describing selected scenes. He tells of a waiter turned terrorist who becomes a police interrogator, lives in a confiscated mansion, and wins the rank of commander. He recalls some comic and heroic escapes, such as the two men who stowed away in the landing gear of a plane flying to Spain; one of them fell out during the journey but the other arrived eight hours later, half-frozen. The charge that the book spins is guilt by association: the Cuban Revolution was conceived in this tradition of violence and it is essentially...