Letter to Times on Castro-Communist Apologists

I sent the following letter to the New York Times regarding a good article the newspaper published on the evasions of American leftists and Cuban apologists of communism and Fidel Castro.


www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/nyregion/10citywide.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


To the Editor:

It is good to see the New York Times publish an article about how American leftists and Cuban apologists for Castro continue to evade the harsh realities of his communist regime (“For Those Who Fled, a Retort to Cuba,” by David Gonzalez, March 10).

However, I would have liked to have seen those realities spelled out in more detail, beyond just the arrest and jailing of some dissidents, and I could do without the underhanded championing of Cuba’s supposedly superior educational and medical industries. (Cuban “education,” for starters, comes with a heavy dose of communist indoctrination, and the medical care is characterized by shortage of inferior services and materials typical of socialist systems.)

Nevertheless, the Times appears to be coming more and more to terms with the anti-human life existence under communist regimes (at least in Cuba and the Soviet Union) that others, such as philosopher and author Ayn Rand, knew and wrote about for many decades before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Joseph Kellard
East Meadow, NY