Cuba meets its citizens’ needs
A recent Observer-Reporter editorial predicted “Cuba will be better off without Castro” upon the death at 90 of the revolutionary leader.
“Much of Castro’s legacy must be written in blood,” is the justification for this conclusion, a popular opinion in the United States not widely shared around the world, most emphatically in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, especially Cuba.
Two years ago, at my family’s reunion, a cousin from the Miami area said she hated Fidel Castro because he tortured people. She voted for George W. Bush twice and presumably for Donald Trump, both advocates for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” If Castro tortured people, which I doubt, he knew it was shameful and, unlike Trump and Bush, not something to brag about. My cousin is oblivious to her hypocrisy, as are the Observer-Reporter editors in echoing the national media’s brutal-dictator propaganda.
Despite a continuing U.S. embargo, crime, heroin addiction, homelessness, obesity and other symptoms of malnourishment, unemployment, untreated mental illness, predatory higher education costs and gross disparities in public schools, income inequality, crushing poverty, and millions of working poor without health care, are not at epidemic levels in Cuba, as they are here. All these are human-rights issues, and it is obvious at least to the rest of the world which government does a better job meeting the needs of its citizens.
Jim Greenwood
Washington