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With a packed itinerary focused on sustainable development, McAuliffe's group, organized by San Francisco-based Global Exchange, learned about Cuba's organic gardens and herbal healing. They visited a rehabilitation center for disabled children and talked with a family physician. In total they logged more than 1,000 miles from Havana to the eastern port city of Santiago and back.

Free societies have these things and free societies don't jail journalists and libraians.

Castro shuffles posts as Cuban economy sags***The government changes began in March with the dismissal of four of six deputy ministers at the Economy and Planning Ministry. Their replacements have not been made public. Last month, Castro also replaced the minister of finance and pricing. The changes come amid one of the harshest waves of repression since Castro rose to power in 1959. Beyond the recent arrests of 75 dissidents sentenced to as many as 28 years in jail and the executions of three hijackers who tried to commandeer a passenger ferry to Florida, the government also has cracked down on black marketeers and conducted raids allegedly in search of drugs, according to various independent reports out of Havana. ***

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Somehow, people named McAuliffe are just somehow instinctively supportive of totalitarian regimes, aren't they?

Not to mention your magnum opus:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/665733/posts
Fidel Castro - Cuba
various LINKS to articles | April 14, 2002

http://www.masterpeaceconference.org/aboutus.htm

Gee, the treasurer for a San Fran based "world peace" organization sets off for Cuba.

"I came here somewhat under the influence that Castro is a bad guy," said McAuliffe, sitting in a Havana hotel lobby. "I felt this was one place [about which] I wasn't hearing the truth. I feel our government has an ax to grind."

Uh, sure she went to Cuba "somewhat under the influence that Castro was a bad guy". Yeah, and you are normally a staunch Republican when you call into Rush.

A simple Googling found that she is teaching pre-algebra at Menlo-Atherton HS, and that her husband passed in 1999. Another leftie filling kids with mush.

U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT - Consular Information Sheet: "CUBA"
http://travel.state.gov/cuba.html

I was in Cuba earlier this year and ran into several people down there with Global Exchange. They are a mixture of devout Communists and naive old ladies with strong leftist leanings of their own. Basically, they were just a bunch of morons. Most of them had "No War!" buttons on to mark themselves as "good" Americans.

This woman is a useful idiot for the commies. The unvarnished truth is that Cuba is a police state. Step out of line and the man really does come and take you away.

If McAuliffe traveled to the genocidical terrorist military dictatorship that calls itself the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, then he would sing gleefully the national anthem of that country, "Ten Million Human Bombs for Kim Il Sung." Kim Il Sung passed from this world nine years ago into Hell, and was reelected to an eternal term as president in 1998. Kim Jong Il, a brinksman and megalomaniac who McAuliffe would salute, chairs the reclusive, despotic, starving, genocidical country's national defense commission

We won't be holding our breaths for the Global Exchange to say a word about wage-slavery in Cuba.

bump

"Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be....
A well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 % literacy"

J.Derbyshire...NRO

I guess the tour didn't go by this square.

WHAT WOULD REAGAN DO?

Miriam J. Masullo, Ph.D.
October 24, 2003

Defying a veto threat, the U.S. Senate approved a measure that eliminates funding to enforce a travel ban to communist Cuba. The White House argues, correctly, that travelers are allowed minimal contact with the people of Cuba, who are denied access to the same beaches and shops in their own country that tourists enjoy. There is no empirical evidence or studies to prove that tourism might improve democracy in Cuba. In fact, experiences in Eastern Europe before and after the demise of communism hint at a very different reality. Nevertheless, policy decisions will be made that could affect many lives, not in Cuba but here in the US. At this time some have asked, what would Reagan have done?

President Reagan's legacy is, among other things, a symbol of American ideals. Very few politicians have conducted their careers primarily as a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil. But, it is those few Americans who have left the greatest mark in our history by virtue of their profoundly inspirational vision of government. America was to President Reagan "the last best hope of man on earth."

During the Cold War, President Reagan's vision for a ballistic missile shield combined his belief in an unlimited American technological ability and a sincere desire to eliminate nuclear weapons because they were fundamentally evil. While there's a political inclination to give Mr. Gorbachev more credit than President Reagan for the end of the cold war, we know for a fact that the former Soviet Union could not afford to spend enough to match the development of the American shield, but they were going to do it anyway, something the President knew in his heart and mind.

President Reagan thus devised a brilliant defense strategy leading to the moral and economic demise of the Former Soviet Union, which resulted in the US emerging victorious without loss of human life or expenditures of defense moneys in active field engagement. Many Americans feel that it was good for us to emerge victorious, that it was good that we did no disintegrate politically and economically during the cold war. All Americans have enjoyed the victory. In addition, the investments in the "Star Wars" Program, indirectly aimed at US technological supremacy (of some sort) had the added benefit of increasing our national technology portfolio.

Scientists know that the fundamental principle of a "Star Wars" defense mechanism was flowed, but strategically it was a brilliant move, motivated by patriotism based on a simple principle: the President wanted America to be strong, stronger than its enemies. President Reagan's decision-making was as simple and elegant as it was advanced. It would work well even today, decades later and in the presence of a different situation, the new war on fear.

Today, as we battle the threat of terrorism, a Reaganesque approach to National Defense would serve us well. We need to be strategic, not tactical, and, we need to use intelligence, not like in G2, but like in using our heads to make decisions. That is where simplicity provides the technical advantage. Rather than intelligence we are using the bottom line and assumptions to decide how to treat our enemies. Cuba is our enemy. Instead of valuing the human aspect of the struggle in front of us, we are assessing the political trade-offs.

Seven nations are on the "state sponsored terrorism" list. We have reason to believe that these nations are working against us in ways that make us hostages of fear. Unfortunately, what we have to fear in the war against terrorism is in fact fear itself. That's what terrorism is all about. Fortunately, what we have to fight with to overcome fear is not politics, but intelligence and our technological superiority which has been long in the making.

Let's consider Cuba. Experts have documented four areas in which Cuba presents a terrorist threat to the US. The areas are:

1. Cuba's military elite force.
2.
An island country, with no border disputes should have no reason to maintain such an expensive resource, unless of course, it is intended to participate in foreign subversion.

3. Cuba's telecommunications resources, capable of interfering with our command, control and communications infrastructures.
Such capacity was assessed by the US government and documented on American TV. This is a force capable of compromising our own security, civil defense capabilities, and even cause irreparable damage to our commercial technological resources.

4. Cuba's capacity to support bacteriological and chemical warfare.
Experts known that the island has in operation several very advanced centers of research, where pharmaceutical, biotechnology and biomedicine sciences are progressing at a very fast rate, with no known commercial applicability and no visible products.

5. Nuclear radiation.
Cuba is known to be building a nuclear plant. The risks involved by such an initiative, under the current economic climate on the island, far outweigh the wisdom of this activity for the small nation in our close vicinity.

In conclusion, these activities are a) exceedingly expensive, b) not sensible national priorities, and c) of questionable cause. We are justified in suspecting that these activities may pose a threat to our national security, a threat that can and has been classified of a terrorist nature. There's ample evidence that the Cuban government, under Castro, views the US as its main enemy.

We know this from decades of well documented speeches and explicit statements that require no semantic interpretations. The debate about the so called embargo only intensifies the discord. While Cuba spends money it doesn't have in order to support activities suspected of being aimed at our destruction, the debate about the embargo is shifting the focus from the real issue which is and has always been our national security.

So what would President Reagan do? The first order of business in a Reaganesque strategy to combat the possible threat of terrorism in this case, would be not to fuel the threat with American dollars. That is why the so called embargo makes such good sense. We should start by eliminating the ambiguous language. Instead of embargo, our current policy should be simply called what it is: "cash only sales," something most Americans have to live with when they have little money and no credit. Something any merchant in American has the right to impose on its customers. Cuba can buy from the US by paying with cash. Cuba trades with all other countries however it wants and can trade.

Secondly, we should not help to supply the island with American dollars. Tourists from all over the world visit the island and stay in wonderful hotels, and bathe in beautiful beaches that the average Cuban is not allowed to enjoy. This is not the kind of society we should patronize with dollars. Without a doubt, tourism has neither enhanced democracy nor the quality of life for the people of Cuba. Much the opposite, the tourism industry in Cuba has created an institution of servitude for the Cuban people.

Nevertheless, some freedom loving members of our own Congress can find it in their hearts to justify unrestricted travel to the island. Some of these men have been in Cuba, stayed in the best hotels and seen for themselves that the average Cuban lives in dilapidated dwellings. Why would they want to participate and encourage this injustice? More tourism flowing freely to the island from the US will bring in more dollars that would in turn fuel the state's agenda. That would be a stupid thing for the US to do because it would fuel those potentially dangerous terrorist threats.
A cash only sales and justified lack of participation in what is at best an unjust tourism industry is not only the moral thing to do, it is the American way, and should force Cuba to prioritize its expenditures in food and medicine rather than in advanced and obscure technologies. It is conceivable that such priorities have not be put into effect in Cuba because of the debate in our Congress and the expectation of more dollars. If the debate had ended sooner things would have been much different in Cuba by now. This is the kind of thinking that President Reagan would consider common sense. The President would have asked Castro to feed the people and let them go.

We should be able to understand, by means of collecting intelligence, analyzing and correlating information, and extrapolating possibilities, where the strengths of potential terrorism activities are in each case, nation by nation, in that list of seven, where Cuba is now number three. We should then put in place plans to undermine those activities that threaten us, not fuel them. We should demand change before we bend to the wishes of a dictator and the speculations of special business interests. That's what President Reagan would do.

The question we should really ask, however, is not what President Reagan would do about Cuba, we know the answer to that. We should not even wonder what will happen in Cuba after millions of Americans start to spend money for travel to the island. What we should be asking, something that nobody stops to think about, is: what will happen to us? Interestingly enough, this issue comes to surface exactly forty years to the day of the October crisis. Remember the Maine!

Miriam J. Masullo, Ph.D.

I do not understand this obsession with Cuba. Cubans are thinking that if they get rid of Castro they will be as rich as their nephews in the US. They should better compare themselves to Santa Domingo, but they seem to blind or to hysterical to understand their own attitude is not fit for capitalism either. Everything is to blame for Castro, they themselves never do anything wrong and everybody has to help them. Please, please, go bother someone else please, thank you! And they wonder why nobody cares about Cuba?