Two Kinds of Anti-Castro Feeling Found in Latin American Areas

(This is the second in a series of articles on Venezuela, drawn from interviews with two members of the group of Venezuelan Journalists who visited the University last week.)

By Michael Lerner, March 6, 1963

Demitrio Boersner, a Venezuelan journalist who writes for La Republica, stated in an interview with the CRIMSON' that the United States must distinguish between two types of anti-Castroism when trying to mobilize hemispheric opinion against the Cuban regime.

"We don't blame Castro in the least for the radical reforms his government has attempted," Boersner said. "We blame him for taking power from the people who made the revolution and reserving it to a bureaucratic clique that runs the country from above."

This type of anti-Castroism, directed "against the totalitarian deviations" of the Cuba regime, is prevalent in Venezuela, Costa Rica, and perhaps Mexico, Boersner stated, where "the Castro movement plays neither a revolutionary nor a progressive role."

The reactionary regimes of Latin America, on the other hand, "generate an anti-Castroism protesting the social reforms of the Cuban government," Boersner said, and termed this illiberal sentiment "easily as bad as the evil it claims to be fighting." Under these governments, which oppose social change, "Castro propaganda is bound to be effective," the journalist warned.

U.S. Might Get More Support

"I think a truly enlightened policy on the part of the United States should involve a clear distinction between the two anti-Castroisms," Boersner explained. "If the United States would dissociate itself in word and deed from the people like Batista and the reactionary economic interests, making clear it does not wish to re-establish in Cuba the system that prevailed before the 1959 revolution, I believe the vast majority of Americans would support your country in sanctions toward Cuba."

While deploring the "ambiguous attitude" of the U.S. government toward the new Cuban government after the fall of Batista, Boersner noted that Latin Americans were unsatisfied with the totalitarian system Castro offered.

"Above all, we blame Castro and his followers for not admitting that every Latin American country should work out its problems in its own way," said Boersner, a member of Romulo Betancourt's governing Accion Democratica party.