From Anything We Can Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism, by Alice Walker:

I do not believe in male-only leadership anywhere in the world, including Cuba. I think the woman at Fidel's side should be his co-president, not his interpreter. Nor do I wish to imitate Frida Kahlo, one of whose last paintings was of "Uncle" Joe Stalin, whose attempts to improve the lives of Russians she respected and about whose gulags and genocidal policies she knew nothing. There is no way of knowing yet what skeletons, if any, are gleaming in Fidel's closet. Or if they are worse than Clinton's, Kennedy's, Gingrich's, or Dole's. For years the United States media have been pulling out bones that almost never, once you actually go to Cuba and talk to Cubans, connect, except grotesquely, to the reality of life there and the dreams and aspirations of the people. As an outsider I have nothing to go on but the universal evidence of healthy bodies, sound teeth, and self-possessed spirits so lacking in many other third-world countries; the excellence Cubans exhibit in so many areas, including medicine, education, and sports. Even the Cuban boat people, escaping from the devastation and hunger of their island, were remarkable for their fitness, their ingenuity in constructing their boats, and often for their ability to speak more than one language.

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