Word: diplomatic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paul Scoon, meanwhile, became in effect a one-man local government, backed by the authority of U.S. guns. He acted decisively in severing all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Libya, ordering them to close their embassies. He directed that the Cubans retain only one diplomat on the island. The three embassies were guarded by U.S. troops. Officially, this was for the protection of the diplomats. Privately, a State Department official in Washington admitted, "We don't want them rattling around the island...
Ostensibly the mobilization is designed to deter the U.S. invasion that Castro regularly warns against in time of crisis. Its real motive is probably to instill enough patriotic feeling to draw the people closer to Castro. If so, it has worked. Says a Latin American diplomat in Havana: "As long as Fidel is around, support for the government will be strong. The people adore him. When they are unhappy with the government, they say, 'Many things happen that the commandante en jefe [commander in chief] doesn't know about...
...Frontiersman who became a minor patron saint of the Kennedy revisionists was Chester Bowles, the career diplomat. He thought that he had located a central problem with the Kennedy Administration. He feared that it deliberately, almost scornfully, detached pragmatic considerations from a larger moral context. To discuss the morality of actions was evidence of softness, and intellectuals with power in their hands cannot bear to be thought soft. Everyone carried the Munich model around in his head. One talked in laconic codes, a masculine shorthand; one did not, like Adlai Stevenson, deliver fluty soliloquies about the morality...
...victim to the local peach brandy (rot'vitti), causing a sensation in a nightclub with an impromptu striptease. He attracts more than the routine attention of the state security police (HOGPo) as well as of most of the women he encounters, from the nymphomaniac wife of a British diplomat to a "magical realist" Slakan novelist who seduces him in a shower, quoting Marx and Freud all the while. "Do you think it is possible to make a dialectical synthesis?" the novelist says. "If we do it well, it might not produce a false consciousness...
...HIID director Perkins is said to be a diplomat who doesn't "needlessly ruffle feathers," in the words of one associate, but one who has worked hard to strengthen the institute's image as an impartial organization seeking only to improve the lot of the country needing advice...