Jon Lee Anderson

And the disdain shown by Trump and his people towards Cuba, however bad, however much the Cuban regime needs changing,

The idea that you come with language that sits in ignorance of everything of the past 200 years that has to do with that country, the fact that it does have proud pride, national pride, nationalism, and always views itself in light of this huge country immediately to its north that's always tried to dominate it.

It's just repeating the old cycle again and again and again.

So

Read your history, do your lessons, show some compassion for other cultures.

These are the maxims I took away from American-style regime change.

Almost always a catastrophic failure.

The young Che Guevara was an incredibly open-minded man.

He was a young man.

He read everything under the sun.

Faulkner, the Bhagavad Gita, Whitman.

He was a humanist.

He devoured knowledge.

He was eventually looking for a cause.

He was very shocked at the socioeconomic conditions of people in the hemisphere as he traveled around Latin America.

But once he was in Guatemala, where there was a CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist government, which he witnessed and lived through, he became extremely anti-American and resolved that Marxism-Leninism was the only credo which had the power to fight against what he saw as the ultimate enemy, the Yankees, whom he called the enemies of humanity.

And for a number of years, he became extremely doctrinaire, very severe.

And I found my own

I remember sitting at his desk in his house where he had sat.

There was even one of his uniforms hanging from a perch nearby, you know, moldy a bit with the humidity in Cuba.