Let Cuba taste free markets

IS President Fidel Castro Ruz's totalitarian regime seeing its last crimson days in Cuba? Perhaps. But the wily old communist somehow has maintained power three years after his Soviet sponsors were toppled in Russia.

The best way, and probably the gentlest way, to push Mr. Castro from power would be to drop the United States trade embargo against the island.

With the embargo gone, Castro no longer could blame Cuba's economic maladies on the Yankees.... An open market would bring in all those Cuban-American entrepreneurs, flush with dollars and ideas of freedom. One of the keys to ending communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was the wider opening of those countries to the West in the 1970s and '80s.

President Clinton ... should drop the embargo against Cuba. That would be the best way to demonstrate to Cubans themselves the title of a popular song some of them now sing about their dear leader: ``El Hombre Es Loco'' - ``The Man Is Crazy.''