Today's (June 4) New York Times editorial tells us that while it's great that Obama isn't railing against Cuba, it still shouldn't be readmitted to the Organization of American States because it "doesn't meet that organization's human rights standard."

I was only one of (so far) 30 readers who responded, and so far, my response has a narrow lead in readers' recommendations.

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"Does not meet the OAS's standards for human rights"? How can anyone write that with a straight face?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, almost none of the member nations met the OAS's standards for human rights. Why were Guatemala and Chile, just to name two noteworthy dictatorships of the period, allowed to remain in the OAS? Oh, right, they billed their torture and extra-judicial killings as "anti-Communist," so it was OK with the U.S. government.

Remember Jeane Kirkpatrick's idiotic classification system: Cuba and Nicaragua were "totalitarian," but countries where the army massacred entire villages or the police grabbed people off the street to be "disappeared" were merely "authoritarian." The distinction appeared to rest entirely on whether the country in question was friendly to American corporate interests.

Singling out Cuba as the hemisphere's bad guy is counter-productive, hypocritical, and childish. It's time for America's fifty-year fit of pique to end.

— pdxtran, Minneapolis
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I especially enjoyed this comment:
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Three cheers for the readers here, who have a better recollection of 20th-century history than do the NYT editorial writers!

— Howlerdog, Pacific Grove, California :applause: