Free Republic

WHY THEY QUIT BEING LEFTISTS By Carlos Alberto Montaner The Independent Institute November 17, 2008 What led these people (along with Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sábato, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and so many other valuable intellectuals) to abandon communism and begin to defend the values of liberty? In the first place, the painful realization that the communist governments, without exception, built societies that were very poor and brutal, from which people invariably tried to flee in desperation. All the communist experiments failed, regardless of the substrata on which they tried to erect their systems. The Germans, the Slavs, the Latin...

Vargas Llosa on Friday took a swipe at the Colombian Nobel Literature Prize winner and longtime friend of the Cuban leader, calling him "a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi." "And he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released," the Peruvian-born Vargas Llosa told Caracol radio. "It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once...