Word: castro
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...pattern goes back at least 30 years. For John Kennedy, bandito Numero Uno was Fidel Castro. The Bearded One occasioned both the greatest debacle of J.F.K.'s term, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and the most dangerous incident of the cold war, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Lyndon Johnson's presidency became a battle of wills between Johnson and Ho Chi Minh. Johnson lost. Jimmy Carter found himself squared off against the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Desert One, site of the failed attempt to rescue the U.S. hostages in 1980, was Carter's Bay of Pigs -- and, as it turned...
...Gulf of Sidra in 1981. Five years later, Reagan wowed the world with Thirty Seconds over Tripoli. That raid was nothing less than an assassination attempt, in the same spirit as the cloak-and-dagger boys' dreams of using exploding cigars and Mafia hit men to finish off Castro in the 1960s. Much was made of how U.S. bombers taught Libya a lesson for its sponsorship of terrorism. Maybe so, but they missed their main target: Gaddafi himself...
There were obviously differences among those cases. Castro had the backing of another, now deceased superpower. Ho was a nationalist waging a civil war, as well as a Kremlin ally waging an ideological one. Khomeini was the avatar of Islamic rage against the West. But they also had something in common: by dodging American bullets, sometimes literally, each enhanced his standing in various quarters of the Third World...
...only communist dictator still in power outside Asia, Fidel Castro is showing signs of desperation. Last week, ignoring all pleas for mercy from around the globe, he gave the go-ahead to the execution of a Cuban exile and stepped up his campaign against disaffected citizens...
...Castro's Council of State made it clear that it hoped to scare off opponents, foreign and domestic. At least 60 human-rights activists have been arrested on the island in the six months since the August coup precipitated the breakup of the Soviet Union, Cuba's principal backer. "The idea," said the council in a statement, "is to stop such loathsome actions from being repeated...