Good! Well "if" that's true you know you go different places once leaving. Some get military assignments... she went on to report directly to NSA.
Who cares?
I call her down to look at the silly stuff or if I need some Cold War technical question answered she gives an opinion. I could type right now saying I'm her... wouldn't change a thing. Believe... don't believe... makes no difference to me and you already know what she said, twice.
The age thing is ridiculous and even you know that. Although we're in our early 50's the overriding fact is Russian studies was her thing. She turned down a full ride at Kentucky just because she wanted so much to follow the Russian studies ... and that was the Army. So Soviets... Communism... satellite states... deep study is experiance.
You must just miss the nuance that Fidel Castro was a danger to the United States and aligned itself with other dangerous leaders as well as the former Soviet Union that had vowed to bury us. And least we forget yet again it was Republican President Eisenhower that first agreed covert actions against Castro were necessary.
Well if that were like I had said English, Swedish, French or Russian, it might of helped. But I showed it to her. I guess you're not real impressive. She just said... Why do you even talk to those guys, and went back upstairs.
So your whole point is that a 17 year old could not embrace Communism. That may be the stupidest thing I've heard so far. By that logic I need to tell all the Vietnam Vets that all those teenage Viet Cong shooting at them in the jungle weren't really there because they were too young.
So this is the guy you wanted just 90 miles away with Soviet weapons. You're right. He seems much better than our own President Eisenhower or Kennedy... great. I'm leaving you with Fidel Castro's own words and ending my part of the discussion here. You're entitled to your opinion.
Castro: How I Became a Communist
From a question-and-answer period with students
at the University of Concepción, Chile, November 18 1971
I was the son of a landowner—that was one reason for me to be a reactionary. I was educated in religious schools that were attended by the sons of the rich—another reason for being a reactionary. I lived in Cuba, where all the films, publications, and mass media were “Made in USA”—a third reason for being a reactionary. I studied in a university where out of fifteen thousand students, only thirty were anti-imperialists, and I was one of those thirty at the end. When I entered the university, it was as the son of a landowner—and to make matters worse, as a political illiterate!
…And mind you, no party member, no Communist, no socialist or extremist got hold of me and indoctrinated me. No. I was given a big, heavy, infernal, unreadable, unbearable textbook that tried to explain political economy from a bourgeois viewpoint—they called that political economy!
And that unbearable book presented the crises of overproduction and other such problems as the most natural things in the world. It explained how in Britain, when there was an abundance of coal, there were workers who didn’t have any, because by the inexorable natural and unchangeable laws of history, of society and nature, crises of overproduction inevitably occur, and when they do, they bring unemployment and starvation. When there’s too much coal, workers will freeze and starve!
So that landowner’s son, who had been educated by bourgeois schools and Yankee propaganda, began to think that something was wrong with that system, that it didn’t make sense…
As the son of a poor man who later became a big landowner, I had the advantage of at least living in the countryside, with the peasants, with the poor, who were all my friends. Had I been the grandson of a landowner, it’s quite possible that my father would have taken me to live in the capital, in a superaristocratic neighborhood and those positive factors at work on me wouldn’t have been able to survive the influence of the milieu. Egoism and other negative traits we humans beings have would have prevailed.
Luckily, the schools I studied in developed some of the positive factors. A certain idealistic rationality; a certain concept of good and evil, just and unjust; and a certain spirit of rebelliousness against impositions and oppression led me to an analysis of human society, and turned me into what I later realized was a utopian Communist. At the time, I still hadn’t been fortunate enough to meet a Communist or read a Communist document.
Then one day a copy of the Communist Manifesto—the famous Communist Manifesto!—fell into my hands and I read some things I’ll never forget… What phrases what truths! And we saw those truths every day!
I felt like some little animal that had been born in a forest which he didn’t understand. Then, all of a sudden, he finds a map of that forest—a description, a geography of that forest and everything in it. It was then that I got my bearings. Take a look now and see if Marx’s ideas weren’t just, correct, and inspiring. If we hadn’t based our struggle on them, we wouldn’t be here now! We wouldn’t be here!
Now then, was I a Communist? No. I was a man who was lucky enough to have discovered a political theory, a man who was caught up in the whirlpool of Cuba’s political crisis long before becoming a full-fledged Communist…
I went on developing. Afterwards, I had the opportunity to know imperialism more concretely than I had through Lenin’s book. I got to know imperialism—the worst and most aggressive of all… And I believe life has given me a better understanding of reality. It has made me more revolutionary, more socialist, more Communist…
