Sir, – Once again, Cuba is reduced to a bit of amusing nostalgia in your pages – a bit of socialist hagiography and mean-spirited pointscoring against the imperialist Yanks (Eamonn McCann, "US should apologise to Cuba, not the other way around", Opinion & Analysis, March 24th).
The tone of nostalgic respect that inevitably colours most Irish media perspectives on the Castros and their regime is disrespectful to the Cuban dissidents who have suffered years of persecution. These activists, jailed and disappeared for asserting their basic rights of speech, religion and assembly, have earned recognition from the UN, Nobel laureates and Amnesty International, but only uncomfortable yawns from the respectable left-of-centre media. No ill-will to Cubans is meant – the US and its bullying blockade is the real target and it all seems a rather fun and harmless way to establish luvvie credentials. Ché and Castro have long been icons for lazy pseudo-socialism amongst both European and American left-leaning elites. Buy the T-shirt, smoke the cigar, maybe even visit Havana and indulge your ruin fetish – no harm done, but do not imagine that all that charisma and nostalgia hide a reality any less brutal than that under the other dictatorships of the world.
Could you please find those journalists who were justifiably outraged at the horrors of Guantánomo and ask them to poke around the other police state on the island?
“Freedom” is perhaps understandably doubt-quoted when it is uttered grandiloquently by an American president, but does that mean the Cubans’ inability to work, vote, worship, assemble, travel and speak freely should not be quoted at all? – Yours, etc,
CHARLES LATVIS,
Clogherhead,
Co Louth.