Madam, - Your Editorial of February 20th says: "Dr Castro's sheer endurance has attracted growing support from other Latin American leaders in recent years. Venezuela, Mexico and Brazil have helped relax the US economic embargo, while buoyant world commodity prices have boosted its [ Cuba's] exports , including from China, and a tourist boom from Europe its foreign currency revenues. As a result [ my italics] there had been some limited extra scope for relaxing internal human rights repressions and harsh regulations against small private business."
"As a result"? You mean that human rights are a sort of luxury a country can have when it gets richer - like, say, broadband or silk underwear? And that in the absence of prosperity then there is no "scope" for human rights reform?
Have you not considered the mountain of evidence that shows that human rights, democracy and free markets lead to prosperity, not the other way round? - Yours, etc,
PAUL MacDONNELL, Shelbourne Road, Dublin 4.