Word: fidel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Both lonely places are in some respects still locked in 1953 (the year 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...
...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 do the rest. Where...
...opposite directions. American and Cuban officials are talking to each other -- albeit on a narrowly defined agenda -- for the first time since last December. At week's end they seemed to be drawing near a preliminary deal under which the U.S. would let more Cubans immigrate legally and Fidel Castro would stanch the flow of rafters...
...Cuban diplomats began talks in New York City on migration issues, more Cubans boarded jerry-built boats to flee starvation in their homeland. Washington proposed an agreement under which the U.S. would accept some 20,000 legal immigrants annually (up from about 2,700 last year). In return, Fidel Castro's regime would take further steps to deter unsafe rafters from departing Cuba. The 16,000 Cubans now at Guantanamo naval base would have to take their place on a waiting list, meaning they would not enter the U.S. for many years...
...flood of despondent people like Jorge pouring out of Cuba ought to herald an epochal end for Fidel Castro. For the first time in 35 years, his rule has begun to look genuinely at risk. Anger at the island's deteriorating economy is growing rapidly, and if something is not done fairly soon to make life easier, people's desperation could reach the combustion point. But a visit to the island shows little evidence of imminent revolt. For now, Fidel faces no organized opposition. Despite their open verbal attacks on Castro and the communist system, the discontented seem readier...