Castro regime applauded

Cuban-born journalist Andres Gomez called United States policy toward Cuba "a policy of genocide" during a speech on campus Wednesday that concluded with a call to spread Fidel Castro's socialist revolution.

Gomez, editor of a left-wing, Spanish-language magazine based in Miami, trumpeted the successes and the survival of Cuban President Castro's 1959 revolution in the face of vigorous opposition from the United States.

The noon speech in LA5-154 was sponsored by the La Raza Student Association and drew an audience of about 30.

Cuba's current economic downfall, exacerbated by a U.S. trade embargo, is due not only to the withdrawal of its major trading partner, the former Soviet Union, but also to the money Cuba spent exporting its revolution to the rest of Latin America, Gomez said.

The nation's resources "were necessary to be used in helping others achieve freedom because Cuba understood that by itself, it could not survive," he explained.

The ensuing economic decline, which has most recently prompted massive immigration from Cuba to the United States, spurred new highs in U.S. abuses, Gomez said. He called the U.S. detainment facilities for Cuban rafters in Panama and the Guantanamo Naval Base "concentration camps."

Though not necessarily because of the economic collapse, reform characterizes the current attitude among Cuban policy makers, Gomez said. For example, he said, the Cuban National Assembly - increasingly independent of the Communist Party - is being infused with younger blood, while the government is loosening its control over agricultural and service markets.

"That's what the Cubans are trying to do, to figure out how to sustain the accomplishments of socialism and how to develop socialism with new methods," Gomez said after the speech.

Gomez said he was too young to have been part of the Caribbean island's revolution in the 1960s. His parents feared Cuba's upheaval in 1959 and fled to the United States, he said. Not until the 1970s did Gomez become an activist and editor of "Areito," a thrice-yearly, 10,000-circulation magazine.

Responding to a question from the audience after his speech, Gomez dismissed a popular notion that if Castro, regarded by many as an international outlaw, were to step down, the international community would put pressure on the United States to end the embargo.

"We don't have to prove to the world that we're a democracy. We have been able to accomplish for our own world what no other country in this hemisphere has been able to accomplish," he said.

Foremost of those accomplishments, he said, is social justice, others include free health care and education and low-cost housing.