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   Quoted:

     I would have registered, but don't go to special trouble. (BTW your
     site doesn't render correctly in Opera 8.5)

     We didn't get a new car in 1958. Dad and I went the rounds of the
     dealerships, and there were several he liked, but he particularly
     wanted a Ford Fairlane 500... what has this to do with Cuba?

     Dad's best friend, "Billy" (not his real name), was a veterinarian,
     and was one of the people Texas A&M went to as host for foreign
     vets looking to expand their knowledge. (He hosted people from
     Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and India -- I'd met and listened to
     Muslims long before I ever met a Jew.) In 1958 his guest was
     Hispanic, and had long sad stories to tell about United Sugar and
     Fulgencio Batista. Dad and Billy listened. (Dad had leftist
     leanings, but he was more populist.) And when the guest left, there
     was no money for a new car. Mother was angry, more so than I can
     remember her being before or since.

     Shortly after that Billy moved away, and the next summer we went to
     visit him, in the '59 Ford Dad managed to scrape together the money
     for after Mother read him the riot act. I still remember sitting in
     Billy's living room, listening on TV to the speech where Fidel said
     "I am a Communist. I have always been a Communist." Most especially
     I remember the pole-axed expression on Dad's and Billy's faces, and
     the shrieks from Billy's wife. (Mother wasn't the shrieking kind.
     But her mouth set in a hard line.)

     You won't find any footnotes about that sort of thing in the
     accounts of the Revolution, and it's now a dim memory of a few old
     coots that there were camps of Cuban revolutionaries in Mexico (and
     South Texas!) in the Fifties. You can even find people, most of
     them in fact, who will deny that any such thing ever occurred. But
     there were a lot of people in the South who had particular reasons
     for despising United Sugar, and a lot of them were interested in
     the trade with Cuba that Batista sat in the middle of like an ugly
     frog taking tolls. Dad and Billy had long memories, and if you want
     to know why Robert Byrd and the other crusty old Southern pols kept
     the Cuba embargo alive, just imagine them realizing betrayal one
     day in 1959. Not all the money and support for the Revolution came
     from rich Cubans and the Russians.

     Regards,
     Ric Locke

   One should never think that [1]Fulgencio Batista was any sort of
   "benevolent dictator." He was a murderer and a thief. Yet by any
   rational measure, it can no longer be denied that what came after for
   the Cuban people was far worse, and has been little but a slow decline
   into greater poverty and greater oppression over the last 47 years
   since Castro's "revolution." Yet I still know people who think he was
   leader of a populist uprising of the peasantry. Like most communists,
   he never was any such thing.

   The tale is simple to tell: look at all the Latin American and
   Caribbean nations that were dictatorships in 1959. Look at how many
   today are now thriving free democracies, and then look at Cuba. The
   results are undeniable.

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista