Karen Wald
Havana, Cuba
`Free Tibet' is reactionary
Some co-workers and youth on the campuses have been
confused by the "Free Tibet" movement, seeing it as a struggle
by an oppressed nationality for self-determination. A recent
news item in the October 2 New York Times should help in
answering that argument.
"The Dalai Lama's administration acknowledged today that it received $1.7 million a year in the 1960's from the Central Intelligence Agency, but denied reports that the Tibetan leadership benefited personally from an annual subsidy of $180,000." The article added that "the money was allocated for the resistance movement [and] was spent on training volunteers and paying for guerrilla operations against the Chinese...."
The decades-long covert program, according to the NYT, was to support the Tibetan independence movement and part of the CIA's worldwide effort to undermine communist governments.
Over the years similar CIA programs and financing have been exposed that were carried out to undermine the revolutionary government of Cuba since 1959 and Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Mark Friedman
Los Angeles, California
Correcting a translation
In reading the speech of Fidel Castro to the South African
National Assembly in Militant number 34, I came across the
following sentence: "At the same time 80,524 Cuban civilian
volunteers, of whom 24,714 are doctors, stomach specialists,
nurses, and health technicians...have provided internationalist
services in Africa...." The word that Fidel used was
"estomatologos." When I was in Cuba some years ago I was
curious to see a number of establishments advertising
"estomatologos," and I thought that perhaps Cubans had a lot of
stomach problems. When I asked, however, I was told that this
is the word that is used in Cuba for "dentists."
In the same issue, in the article entitled "The pit of sex scandals and politics of resentment," there is a sentence that reads, "From the standpoint of the working class, it's much better when every worker could care less about the sex life of Clinton...." From a grammatical and political point of view I think it would be better if every worker couldn't care less about the sex life of Clinton.
Tony Prince,
Cleveland, Ohio
Editors' reply: Thanks, you're right on both counts.
The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of general interest to our readers. Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.