"This is so arbitrary for a man whose only crime is to write what he thinks," his wife, Blanca Reyes, said in an April 8 New York Times article. "What they found on him was a tape recorder, not a grenade."
The Clinton administration - which has so much to answer to history for - promoted "people-to-people" trips to Cuba, which have continued. The American tourists and the participants in educational and cultural exchanges will not be able to engage in person-to-person visits with Raul Rivero, and other Cubans whom the Castro "justice system" has turned into non-people. Not even such an eminence as Spielberg will be free to show Rivero videos of Holocaust survivors.
Mr. Spielberg, immersed in pre-production of his next film, was not available for comment on Mr. Castro's latest eradication of dissenters. But his representative, Andy Spahn of Dreamworks, told The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Castro had been "provoked" to order the crackdown, because the head of the American mission in Havana, James Cason, had been meeting - can you imagine? - with Cuban dissenters in their homes last February.
And if an American official had, however discreetly, been meeting with Jews in Berlin who still hoped that the world would come to their rescue - if it only knew of the design for the Final Solution - would that diplomat have exceeded his responsibilities to humankind by "provoking" Hitler?***