The Fourth Raleigh International Spy Conference coveres the topic of Castro and Cuba: The Inside Story
A panel of experts discusses "Castro and Cuba: Then and Now". Topics include Castro's childhood, Castro's leadership and speaking abilities, comparisons with other world leaders, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba and the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, and Cuban refugees. After their remarks, the panelists respond to audience members' questions.
Panelists include: Don Bohning, Art Padilla, Tim Naftali, Gene Poteat, Humbert Fontova, and Brian Latell.
Bio
Don Bohning
Latin American editor for the Miami Herald from 1967 to 2000 and author of "The Castro Obsession: US Covert Operations Against Cuba, 1959-1965".
Humberto Fontova
Humberto Fontova is a columnist and author born in Cuba who emigrated to the US in 1961. He received his MA in History from Tulane and writes books and articles about Castro's influence on the American Left. He is author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant".
Dr. Brian S. Latell
Brian Latell has been a Latin America and Caribbean specialist for the last four decades and lectures regularly on these subjects to university, professional, and political groups. Currently a senior associate in the CSIS Americas Program, he was an adjunct professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he taught undergraduate and upper-level courses including: Cuba and the Great Powers, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Crises in U.S.-Latin American Relations. In 1998, Latell retired after three and a half decades as a foreign intelligence officer, having served in the U.S. Air Force and for extended periods as a Latin America specialist at the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Intelligence Council.
From 1994 to 1998, he served as director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, where he managed programs in intelligence history, records declassification, and academic outreach and served as publisher and chairman of the editorial board of Studies in Intelligence, the journal of the profession. From 1990 to 1994, he was national intelligence officer for Latin America, the highest-ranking analytic position for that region in the U.S. intelligence community.
Latell has consulted throughout the region with presidents, senior government officials, U.S. embassy officers, and regional leaders in diverse fields. He is frequently quoted in press coverage of political trends in Latin America, particularly of Cuba and Fidel Castro. He has written on Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, and other countries, as well as on foreign intelligence issues. He studied at universities in Mexico and Spain and has lived or traveled extensively in all but one of the Latin American countries.
Timothy J. Naftali
Timothy Naftali, author of George H.W. Bush, is the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, having previously served as director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia.
A frequent contributor to Slate and NPR, he is the co-author of the award-winning Khrushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary and One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964. He is also the author of Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism.
Arthur Padilla
Associate Professor, North Carolina State University, Management.
Eugene S. Poteat
President, Association of Fmr. Intelligence Officers.
I found this panel to be significantly more complex than rocketdog suggests. There are some dead zones, but overall informative and even entertaining for Latin America or history junkies like me.
Well, if reading the program description for this clip still leaves you up in the air about the political bent of this particular group, you need only hear Arthur Padilla's comparison of the shared traits of such totalitarian dictators as Castro, Mussolini, and Hitler with those of that ultimate iron-fisted socialist, William Jefferson Clinton, without a single other person in the room so much as batting an eye. Viva Clinton! Viva la Revolution!