Word: fidels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Carriles, a Cuban exile suspected and arrested in various countries, and once convicted (though later pardoned), for crimes that included the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people, the 1997 bombings of two Havana hotels that killed an Italian tourist, and a 2000 plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. After entering the U.S. illegally in 2005, Posada, 81, is today a free man in Miami...
Posada's is a quintessential Cold War story. As a CIA operative in the 1960s, he worked unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist regime of then Cuban leader Fidel Castro (who officially ceded power to his younger brother Raúl last year because of failing health). At the time of the 1976 airliner bombing, he worked for Venezuela's secret police. Despite abundant evidence against him, a Venezuelan military tribunal acquitted him of the Cubana attack. That verdict was overturned, however, and in 1985, while Posada was being tried in a civilian criminal court, he escaped disguised as a priest...
South Africa can take comfort from the knowledge that even its greatest leader had trouble making the transition from revolutionary to democrat. In office, Mandela expressed admiration for autocrats like Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and in his farewell speech to the ANC party conference in 1997 claimed South Africa's violent crime was part of a "counter-revolution" engineered by pro-apartheid whites "to render the country ungovernable." But in retirement, Mandela rediscovered his inner democrat, speaking out against tyranny, wherever he found it - even in his own party. In March 2007, at the funeral of Adelaide Tambo, wife...
Indeed, Raúl, who until succeeding Fidel was Cuba's Defense Minister for almost five decades, placed numerous military brass loyal to him in key posts. They included General Jose Amado Ricardo Guerra as Secretary of the Council of Ministers, who replaces Carlos Lage, 57, a physician turned economics czar who is widely credited with seeing Cuba through the financially harrowing 1990s after the island lost its massive Soviet subsidies. Lage was often mentioned as a possible successor to Fidel...
Both Lage and Perez Roque are said to have fallen out of favor with Raúl. But Fidel, in an effort to dispel the widespread appearance of Raulismo vs. Fidelismo, published an essay in the state-run Cuba Debate a day after Raúl's changes in which he insisted that he had signed off on the ousters. In classic Fidel style - portraying fired officials as fallen communist angels - he wrote that Perez Roque and Lage were "liberated from their posts" not because they were Fidelistas but because "the honey of power" had infected them and "awakened...