THE letter from L. Allen (South China Morning Post, October 31) stating amazement at the shallowness of Simon Beck's pro-Castro article was a tad ignorant. Beck's piece was simply giving the facts about the ways Dr Castro was greeted and treated during his trip to the United Nations.
Beck tells us that Dr Castro received a hero's welcome in New York City. Furthermore, some celebrities travelled across the United States in order to seek an audience. At the same time, some Cuban exiles, including Dr Castro's daughter, failed to raise much interest in protests over his visit.
Mr Allen could have gleaned from these facts that while Dr Castro's political record is far from clean, he must have done something admirable to garner such respect. Perhaps Mr Allen doesn't know that Cuba is one of the few, some say the only, country in the world that has eliminated racism.
Perhaps he doesn't know that widespread poverty and human-rights abuses often go hand in hand. Mr Allen claims that Cuba has the worst human-rights record in Latin America and blames this solely on Dr Castro, the 'communist dinosaur', while forgetting that in the early 1960s the US put a trade embargo on Cuba. The embargo, which is still in place, virtually starved the nation and drove Dr Castro into the Soviet camp.
Mr Allen has overlooked the fact that pre-Castro Cuba was a playground for rich Americans where urban Cubans were relegated to jobs in the service industries. Rural Cubans were mostly illiterate and barred from growing food on land that had been taken over by American companies. Does Mr Allen know that Dr Castro implemented a public education system and today Cubans are among the most literate people in the Third World or that at one time Cuba had more doctors per head than any other South American country.
While it is impossible to deny Dr Castro's human-rights abuses, it's clear that the level of abuse has grown as the Cuban economy has crumbled. What does the US Government so fear about Cuba that makes it unwilling to lift the embargo? Mr Allen certainly seems to be holding a grudge about the Cuban missile crisis yet is unaware that at the time the US had a large number of missiles installed in Turkey aimed at Moscow. If the US Government would be brave enough to call off its embargo, the Cuban economy might stand a chance and political reform would be possible. Time and time again Dr Castro has signalled his willingness to adapt and other governments have embarked on trade agreements with Cuba.