INTELLECTUALS?

Artists, writers defend Castro (Washington Times, 5/03/03)

Singer Harry Belafonte, who recently called Secretary of State Colin L. Powell a "house slave," has joined actor Danny Glover and more than 160 artists and intellectuals to defend Fidel Castro's government against criticism over its recent crackdown on dissent.

The group issued a two-paragraph declaration denouncing the war in Iraq and condemning U.S. "harassment" of Cuba, which it calls a "pretext for invasion." [...]

It was also signed by Latin American Nobel laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rigoberta Menchu, Aldolfo Perez Esquivel and South African writer Nadine Gordimer, also a Nobel prize winner.

"A single power is inflicting grave damage to the norms of understanding, debate and mediation among countries," the declaration says, referring to the United States and the war in Iraq.

"At this very moment, a strong campaign of destabilization against a Latin American nation has been unleashed. The harassment against Cuba could serve as a pretext for an invasion." [...]

While Latin America's revered left-wing intellectuals are abandoning Mr. Castro in horror at the recent crackdown on dissidents, Mr. Garcia Marquez continues to stand by the Cuban leader, an old friend.

The 1982 Nobel Prize-winning author, whose novel "Autumn of the Patriarch" has been acclaimed as the classic account of the Caribbean strongman, refuses to join the likes of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes and Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in condemning Mr. Castro.

Mr. Castro in 2002 wrote a glowing review of Mr. Garcia Marquez's recently published memoirs.

"In my next reincarnation, I would like to be a writer, and, on top of that, I'd like to be one like Gabriel Garcia Marquez," the communist leader wrote in the Colombian magazine Cambio.

It's one thing for these folks to have been on the wrong side of history in the 50's and 60's, when the outcome sometimes seemed in doubt, but how stupid do you have to be to side with Communism in the 21st Century? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 3, 2003 6:30 AM