Dreaming about Cuba

It is disappointing to see such unsubstantiated speculations as those in the opinion-page article "Cuban Army Is Key to Political Change," Oct. 2. This article echoes the Alice-in-Wonderland fantasies of Miami-based Cuban exiles who a couple years back were reclaiming their estates and businesses in Cuba.To be told that it was not Fidel Castro's guerrillas who overthrew Batista, but an "unsuccessful 1956 Army coup" that "facilitated Castro's rise to power" smacks of an Orwellian dumping of facts down a memory hole. The authors have a right to dream. But to propose (without any evidence) that "back room politicking" in the Cuban Communist Party is plotting an Army coup smells less of a dream than of calculated disinformation. Anyone who knows of the hunger, murder, and misery in most of Latin America has reason to believe that, squeezed though they may be by the United States embargo and the Soviet cutoff, Cubans have accomplished something good in the last 32 years and want to defend it. F. O. Richardson, Brooklyn, N.Y.

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