CUBA: Khrushchev's Protectorate

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Communists, So What? Cuba was having its own diplomatic headaches. Four Cuban ambassadors (to Italy, Switzerland, El Salvador and Britain) quit or were fired. All had dared to warn against Cuba's drift toward Communist control. Even more embarrassing to Castro was the defection of the man he had recently designated to be ambassador to the U.S. A law professor at the University of Havana, José Miró Cardona was Castro's first Prime Minister after the fall of Dictator Fulgencio Batista. His disenchantment had increased as the months went by. In a letter of resignation last week to Castro's puppet President, Osvaldo Dorticós, Miró explained that "ideological differences between government policies and my conscience are insurmountable." Then he ducked for cover in the Argentine embassy in Havana, as a hail of manufactured hatred clattered around him. Behind, Miró left a memorandum of the final conversation he had had with Dorticós. In the heat of discussion, Miró suggested to Dorticós that he had a totalitarian concept of the state. Dorticós' angry reply: "If Cuba wishes, we will say 'Yes, we are Communists. So what?' "

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