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 officer with the Department
                  of State.