The Activist's Media Handbook by David Fenton

Author:David Fenton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Earth Aware Editions
Published: 2022-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

My heart racing, I told them to call my lawyer and never spoke to them again.

Through my later friendship with Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, I spent more time with Castro in the 1980s, as he and Manley were friends from neighboring islands. Castro is perhaps the most complicated figure of the twentieth century. He was a horrible human rights violator. He inexcusably kept dissidents in prison long past their sentences and relentlessly crushed dissent. At the same time, we will never know what his government would have been like if the United States had not been so committed to overthrowing and killing him. That could make anyone sufficiently paranoid to suppress opposition and seek support from another superpower. Every time I came to Cuba from an impoverished Central American nation, it was astonishing to see the level of literacy, education, and medical care available to everyone at that time. Yet, the upper classes had left the country as their property was brutally seized and redistributed. Certainly Castro was one of the most spellbinding, charismatic, flawed, and dogmatic people I have ever met. Years later, I worked with Nelson Mandela, who said that without Castro, he might well have died in prison. More on that later.

I realize it will be easy to distort my comments here about Castro, who remains a highly polarizing figure in our country. When Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2020, he condemned Castro’s crackdowns on the opposition, while also mentioning that Castro had introduced many reforms, including a massive literacy program, that proved remarkably successful for reducing poverty and improving Cubans’ quality of life. Critics mercilessly attacked Bernie for that, but he was right. Castro did both horrible and good things, as history will undoubtedly show. President Barack Obama was certainly right to open diplomatic relations with Cuba, as the cruel previous policy of isolation never worked and never will.

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