"Mr. President, Mr. President," shouted the NBC TV correspondent over the clamor of his 250 colleagues jostling to be recognized by Fidel Castro. "There are many Cubans living in Florida who say you won't be in power within a year, and they're ready to come here and take over when you leave. What would you say to them?"

It was April 3, 1990, and Cuba's President was holding a nationally televised press conference at Havana's International Convention Center. The Soviet Union was in crisis, and East European socialism in disarray; Panama was occupied by U.S. troops and Nicaragua's Sandinistas were out. The U.S. had just begun transmitting TV Martí into Cuba, a first ever attempt by one nation to impose a TV station on another. Havana was considering retaliating with AM radio broadcasts into the United States, and Washington threatened to bomb the island's radio transmitters if it dared.

"Well," joked Fidel Castro, who appeared in excellent humor, "neither of us can say. Only God knows whether I'll be here in a year... But the truth is that they have been saying that for three decades now ...They pay too much attention to me. What's really unbelievable is how little attention they pay to the Cuban people, how much they underestimate our people..." ¹

Just two months earlier I had toured 20 states in the USA to talk about Cuba. I had five years in Cuba and over 1,000 articles under my belt as the Havana-based People's Daily World Latin American correspondent. But they were not just any five years. They were the Gorbachev years during which the bulwark of the world socialist movement, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, came unglued. Years during which the international alliance against colonialism and neocolonialism blew apart from within. Years during which the United States and its allies emerged practically unchallenged on the world scene.

As European socialism crumbled, I could find no sign that a similar

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