Cuba Policy

Re your Aug. 11 editorial, “Bridge to Cuba”: long overdue, and only because we want a medical breakthrough. You call Washington’s economic embargo of Cuba “hoary foreign policy.” I would add sick, stupid, stultifying and slanted. Why do we conduct business with communist China, Korea, Vietnam and any number of dictator countries? Is it because they don’t have a Miami-Cuba lobby?

Fidel Castro may have led a hard-won revolution but it was only because the Cuban people were badly exploited by American business and gambling interests permitted by greedy Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and his wealthy cohorts. Lest we forget, if we ever remembered, Castro did turn to us for assistance but we turned our back to him, thereby pushing him even further into the Soviet embrace.

SHIRLEY WOLF

Santa Monica

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The Times rightly calls for the U.S. government to allow a U.S. pharmaceutical giant to test a breakthrough vaccine for group B meningitis.

What a shame U.S. scientists cannot freely travel to learn about the medical advances their colleagues there make for humanity, not profit.

The Times suggests that “Castroism [is] likely to pass with its founder.” Just as the pundits predicted the imminent fall of the Cuban government with the collapse of the USSR? And what of similar boasts that the overturn of dictatorships in the Soviet orbit would create solid investment possibilities, flourishing market economies and a big dollar bounty for U.S. corporations?

When millions of Cubans march in solidarity with their socialist government, it is absurd to assert that the death of one individual would mean the end of a revolution that has successfully defied the U.S. for 40 years--and makes medical progress that is the envy of U.S. scientists.

JON HILLSON

Los Angeles