Saturday, May 23, 1998; Page A23

Cuban leader Fidel Castro must be feeling thrice blessed in his visitors. First the pope; second, the Canadian prime minister; third, and least, the rejected (and consequently retired) aspirant to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Jack Sheehan. The pope had high moral and spiritual objectives. The Canadian prime minister had crasser economic objectives. But why Sheehan with his delegation from the Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba (a group that disappears from Sheehan's article [Outlook, May 3] the instant it is mentioned)?

Sheehan appears to be engaging in a tiresome mea culpa about how beastly the United States is being to individual Cubans and their misunderstood leadership. These semi-sniveling screeds seem all the current rage, whether they are partaken by a former secretary of defense about Vietnam or a senior Air Force officer on the (prospective) horror of nuclear weapons. For Sheehan, the present ogre is the Helms-Burton Act that is causing little children "unnecessary pain," costing children over age 7 their milk allotments and apparently even forcing the citizens of Santiago de Cuba to walk rather than use public transportation. Somehow, it is the fault of the U.S. government that the Cuban people are suffering, not the policies of the repressive Communist dictatorship that rules the country.

Sheehan recalls the history of our countries during the Cold War and in the same sentence implies an equivalence between our effort to save the Vietnamese people from communist dictatorship and Castro's efforts to impose it on various African countries. His conclusion that Cuba "is not a military threat to the United States" suggests a new-found revelation when, of course, any analyst will recall that once Soviet missiles were removed from the island, the Cuban threat was through the promotion and support of insurgency throughout Latin America. If Castro now proclaims a desire to be a good neighbor, it is because he no longer has the military and economic wherewithal to be a bad one.

Most pitiful is Sheehan's fawning description of Castro with his "soft voice" describing his family's "small plot of land," denying that he arrests dissidents and recounting his desire to work against drug trafficking with the United States. Could this be the same Castro who sent thousands "to the wall" for execution at the beginning of his regime and during the recent visit of the Canadian prime minister charged the United States with "genocide" and "holocaust"? Yes, and we remember that Hitler loved little children and small dogs. For good measure, Sheehan recounts with wide-eyed credulity the claim of air force Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, reportedly forced to shine shoes during the Batista era as "the only work he could get," as if Cuba during that period was poverty stricken, rather than almost the most prosperous country in Latin America.

From his account of the 8 1/2-hour boozy, cigar-puffing dinner-evening, Sheehan did not dwell on inconvenient points that a reader of the State Department's 1997 Human Rights Report might have raised: arbitrary arrests; beatings; denials of fair trials; control of the media; restrictions on assembly and religion; and an absence of anything equating to the democratic norms or freedoms now predominant elsewhere in Latin America. Indeed, Sheehan's only views on the dramatic shootdown-murder of two U.S. civilian planes and their crews in international waters in February 1996 appear to be irritation that it stopped his conversations with Cuban military colleagues.

There is no question that Castro is squirming desperately to maintain power following the collapse of world communism and his Soviet sponsors. He will offer marginal socio-political concessions for the economic support that will extend communist rule and his personal authority. He will hope to postpone the days of reckoning that will turn the final page on his failed, vicious regime. What a shame Sheehan felt unable to answer Castro's self-serving question as to whether the United States would "ever treat Cuba as it treats other nations, with a relationship based on mutual respect, not ideology." Given the record, he might have said, "We treat you with the respect you deserve."

-- David T. Jones

The writer is a retired senior Foreign Service