Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR FULBRIGHT AND CUBA In his article "Fulbright and Cuba" (NL, April 13), Theodore Draper takes the Arkansas Senator to task for labelling the boycott against Cuba a failure. He...
...The U.S...
...Combridge, Mass...
...New York City Beatrice Braude...
...To the extent that we imitate the enemy in its essentials, then we become the enemy...
...policy...
...But then the evils of Communism are triumphant...
...Fulbright from wrecking the policy...
...Draper recognizes that "the boycott left Cuba wide open to the Soviets," but refuses to see Fulbright's wisdom in finding that ending the boycott may help end that dependence...
...Also, the resumption of diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba could serve as a warning to Latin American Rightists that anti-Communism in itself will not win the undying support of Washington, that the U.S...
...He asserts that such a declaration is premised on the boycott's having been designed to bring down the Castro regime, but that in fact it never had such a mission...
...Let us hope that the Commission's final report offers some refutation of his conclusions, or there is no question that, as Lineberry predicts, 20 years from now, people will be asking, "Who really murdered John F. Kennedy...
...Fidel's original "search for offers" from Communist nations, though clearly an attempt to end dependence on the U.S...
...New· York City Ramon H. Hulsey In attacking the hard-headed realism of Senator Fulbright, Theodore Draper raises up...
...stands to benefit from the weakening of ties of dependence among Communist nations...
...Even if this absurdity were true, isn't it possible that both sides might benefit from the same policy...
...Fulbright wisely wishes to change that policy...
...Draper, in the tradition of devil-theorists, insists that "Every time [not sometimes or many times?] a Communist power needs a breathing spell...
...boycott puts undue burdens on American diplomacy, which must make unwise concessions to allies on other issues to retain their support on this irrelevant one...
...it begins to . . . dangle offers of trade...
...This is an amazing feat of intellectual horse-switching in midstream, but yet it does not keep him from declaring that Senator Fulbright's contribution to the debate "suffers from imprecision and perhaps disingenuousness," qualities perhaps less excusable in a scholar with no official responsibilities than in a statesman who must be concerned with the diplomatic effect of his utterances...
...Politics is not a zero-sum game...
...nomic dependence...
...to imitate the Kremlin in "ruthlessly" using "foreign trade and aid as an instrument of foreign policy...
...Draper asks the U.S...
...Although some of his reasoning seems to be based on misinformation, Buchanan points out enough inconsistencies in the evidence to have left at least one reader very uneasy...
...and its allies, was hardly undertaken to achieve a new ecoThe New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...2.) the top echelons of the Dallas police were heavily involved...
...Then in his concluding remarks Draper completes the picture by seeming to equate the abandonment of the boycott with giving up all hope and effort to bring down the Castro regime...
...The two policies were not mutually exclusive, and governments seldom feel constrained to limit themselves to just one policy to bring about a desired end...
...will respond to democratic reforms which destroy the basis of Communist revolution, not to cold war rhetoric that helps polarize the world and make Communist revolutions seem more desirable...
...Nevertheless, millions of Americans, including Presidential candidates Nixon and Kennedy, felt that the motivation behind the boycott policy was the desire to destroy the Castro regime...
...Edward Friedman 'PLOT' After reading William Lineberry's article "The Lingering 'Plot'" (NL, April 27), it is perhaps worth pointing out that the Arab and the Eastern European countries are not the only ones where it is believed the Kennedy assassination was a "plot...
...That unfortunate reality was made possible with the help of U.S...
...After all this, one is surprised when Draper seems to argue that the boycott could now accomplish Castro's destruction, and asserts that the Cuban regime has been backed into an economic corner from which it cannot escape with Soviet aid alone, or with smallscale British and French trade deals...
...Thus in the beginning of Draper's article the boycott does not have the mission of bringing down the Cuban regime...
...The unpopular U.S...
...The influential (and non-Communist) French weekly L'Express recently ran a series of articles by an American named Thomas Buchanan which, after exhaustive analysis, concluded, among other things, that 1.) at least three persons, including Oswald and Ruby, took part in the killing...
...and 3.) the chief instigators were probably oil industrialists...
...To argue, as Draper does, that the boycott was "obviously" not given such a mission, because if it had been there would have been no Bay of Pigs adventure, is to use an unusual kind of reasoning...
...but on reading further we learn that whether or not it has this mission, it seems on the verge of accomplishing it (providing we can keep Mr...
...But if what truly bothers Draper is that Cuba is a "dependent outpost of a Communist world," then why support an economic boycott that reinforces that dependence...
...Fidel, as most nationalist revolutionaries, wants his independence, economically as well as politically...
...In one of the later articles, written from the United States, Buchanan states he had a long interview with representatives of the Warren Commission during which he provided them with all the material he had gathered...
...in part, the specter of "the ultimate victory of world Communism...
Vol. 47 • May 1964 • No. 10
