Word: castro
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...WEEKS, FIDEL CASTRO'S AIDES had been urging him to relax. Engaged in a one-year campaign to improve relations with various nations around the world, including the U.S., Cuba's President, now 69 years old, had been working too hard and traveling too much. So on Saturday, Feb. 24, he claims, he decided to take the day off. He retired to one of his Havana-area homes and began paging through My Truth, a book that tells how Mikhail Gorbachev, in opening the door to reform, failed to control dissent and wound up losing power. These days, Castro will...
Just how far Castro is willing to go to prove that he is still tough and in control became apparent that Saturday, when his phone began ringing around 4 p.m. It was his chief of staff calling to tell him that 40 minutes earlier, three small, unarmed Cessna planes piloted by Cuban-American exiles from Miami, members of a group called Brothers to the Rescue, had penetrated Cuba's airspace with the apparent intention of dropping antigovernment leaflets over Havana. Castro's Air Defense Force had just blown two of the planes out of the sky, killing four...
This is how Castro tells it, anyway; some claim that he must have known about the shoot-down and given clearance for it himself. In any case, he had certainly approved the directive handed down several weeks earlier that if planes flown by the Brothers to the Rescue appeared to be trespassing on Cuban airspace, as they often had in the previous year and a half, they must be stopped by any means necessary. The brutality of the attack on the defenseless Cessnas seems to have been of little consequence to Castro. But from the point of view...
...Last Wednesday night, in an exclusive interview with TIME lasting 4 1/2 hours, Castro offered some insight into the reasons behind his decision. His bristling sense of nationalism was offended by the flights, and beyond that, he felt humiliated. Even before the shoot-down, Castro said, he was incensed about a homegrown dissident group that was hoping to exploit the new openness of Cuba's economy as a way to reform its political system. Since the beginning of February, his security forces have rounded up or harassed some 150 dissidents. His anger was exacerbated by Brothers to the Rescue, which...
Last July, Jose Basulto, a Bay of Pigs veteran with CIA connections who piloted the only plane that escaped the Feb. 24 attack, buzzed Havana, dropping leaflets that exhorted Cubans to overthrow Castro. Cuba complained to the U.S., and the Federal Aviation Administration launched a probe, still ongoing, into whether Basulto's license should be suspended. But that did not deter him from his anti-Castro campaign. According to records the Cuban government provided TIME, the Brothers entered Cuban airspace more than a dozen times in 1994 and '95, and Cuba said it made a diplomatic protest on most occasions...