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The Obama Administration’s announcement that it would ease travel restrictions to Cuba was met by strong criticism by two members of South Florida’s Congressional Delegation. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL-18) issued the following statement to the media regarding today’s announcement by the Obama Administration to ease regulations on travel and remittances to Cuba: “Loosening these regulations will not help foster a pro-democracy environment in Cuba. These changes will not aid in ushering in respect for human rights. And they certainly will not help the Cuban people free themselves from the tyranny that engulfs them. These changes undermine U.S. foreign policy and...

"It is unthinkable that the administration would enable the enrichment of a Cuban regime that routinely violates the basic human rights and dignity of its people.” G u l a g B o u n d The New York Times noted that the White House lifted restrictions on travel and payments to communist Cuba “when most Republican members of Congress were away on retreat and Democrats had left their offices for the long holiday weekend,” and that the timing “indicated that the administration hoped to enact the changes with as little fanfare—and backlash—as possible.” The changes were posted at 5:42...

The Obama administration on Friday announced the broadest liberalization of travel to Cuba in a decade, making it easier for American students and religious and cultural groups to visit the Communist-ruled island. It still will not be legal for ordinary American tourists to vacation in Cuba, which has been under a U.S. economic embargo for nearly 50 years. But the measures will expand the categories of who is authorized to travel, which are currently restricted to Cuban Americans and a limited number of others. They also will allow U.S. citizens to send up to $2,000 a year to help Cubans...

The Obama administration on Friday announced the most wide-ranging liberalization of travel and money-sending regulations to Cuba in over a decade, making it easier for American students and religious and cultural groups to visit the Communist-ruled island. It will still not be possible for ordinary American tourists to vacation legally in Cuba, which has been under a U.S. economic embargo for 48 years. But members of educational, cultural and religious groups will be able to get licenses for travel more readily. In addition, the new regulations will permit Americans to provide money to Cuban churches and small businesses. Previously, such...

Jan. 8 — Sad news was broadcast this afternoon from the United States: Gabrielle Giffords, Democratic congresswoman for Arizona, was the victim of a criminal attempt while taking part in a political meeting at her electoral district in Tucson. On the other side of the border lies Mexico, the Latin American country to which that territory used to belong when, in an unjust war, more than one half of its area was seized from it. Along its arid surface, many of those who emigrate from Mexico, Central America and other Latin American countries try to escape hunger, poverty and the...

Monica Castro had a violent argument with her husband, an illegal alien, a few days before their daughter Rosa's first birthday. The family lived in a mobile home near Lubbock, TX. Monica left her daughter and the home to report the illegal status of her husband, Omar Gallardo, to the local Border Patrol office. She claims to have offered the information concerning the legal status of her husband in exchange for custody of her daughter. Besides being an illegal, Gallardo was wanted for questioning as a witness to a murder. On the morning of December 3, 2003, Federal Agents raided...

Raúl Castro is intent on building an efficient and productive socialism, capable of generating profits. That is why he has just laid off half a million unneeded wage earners. The objective is to detach 25 percent of the labor force from the state within 18 months. That's 1.3 million workers who will be put on the street so they may be absorbed by the still-unborn private microentrepreneurial sector. Castro and his claque keep repeating that the revolution cannot feed an army of idle workers. Subsidies must be trimmed, social benefits must be reduced. The general is very confused. He understands...

A prominent Portuguese journalist and gay activist was found murdered in a New York City hotel, his body brutally mutilated. Carlos Castro, 65, was found dead last night inside a 34th-floor room at the Intercontinental New York Times Square Hotel. Sources tell CBS Station WCBS that Renato Seabra, a male model in his 20s who checked into the hotel with Castro late last month, is in police custody at Bellevue Hospital. Authorities said police responded to a 911 call of an unconscious male at the InterContinental New York hotel. When police arrived at the scene, they found Castro around 7...

Like thousands of other Cubans, Leticia's worries began in October when President Raul Castro announced a series of economic reforms to bring the communist regime up to date. Pivotal to the changes is cutting more than a million government jobs, or 20 percent of Cuba's entire work force, over the next three years -- including 22,000 jobs in the health sector. Castro said 500,000 jobs would have to go by March 31 of this year. The first culling of so-called "bloated payrolls" dragging down the Cuban economy began Tuesday in the sugar, farming, construction, health and tourism sectors, as announced...

Cuba has begun the process of laying-off a tenth of its state workforce in a drive to push employees into small businesses that could mark the beginning of the end of the 50-year communist experiment on the island. The state labour union announced this week that the first of some 500,000 employees could expect to receive "pink slips" immediately, effectively terminating their employment in the public sector where, until now, almost 90 per cent of Cuba's workforce have been employed. The lay-offs will begin in the ministries of agriculture, sugar, construction, health and tourism, according to Salvador Valdes, the leader...

As the final days of his long congressional career were falling from the calendar, corrupt Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd was uplifted as one special interest after another heaped praise upon him. They were the beneficiaries of his years of generosity with other people's money and his advocacy of federal mandates that enriched them. And for all those years, they completed the quid pro quos by delivering copious sums and manpower for his re-election campaigns. In another context, prosecutors would call this extortion or racketeering; in this context, however, it's just called government. The news media, new and old, also kissed...

An unrepentant terror mastermind has a parole hearing scheduled for early January 2011 in civilian court...During the 1970s and 80s, this socialist revolutionary presided over a clandestine terror network that, among other things, attacked American civilians with over 130 bombs, proudly claimed responsibility for cold blooded murders, prostituted the Episcopal Church in Chicago and New York to cover and promote their terror activities and were trained by a surrogate of Castro’s Cuban Intelligence agency. This terrorist is none other than FALN patriarch and co-founder Oscar Lopez Rivera, who along with his Islamic contemporary Yasser Arafat, is one of the fathers...

...There is no doubt among that audience, however, that Cuba is on the cusp of change. ... For Alberto, my barber on Havana's Calzada de Infanta, the effects have been immediate. "Things have certainly been better for us," he says of the new system that allows barbers and hairdressers to own and run their salons, set their own prices and pay taxes. "The old system was crazy by comparison." Alberto's wages have risen by more than 300 per cent. "I used to make 20 or 30 pesos a week. Now I'm taking home nearly a 100." Certainly, the price list...

One would have thought we were well past the day when the the folks at PBS would be shilling for Castro and Communism, but one would be wrong. Mary Anastasia O'Grady brings us a remarkable example of Castroite stupefaction in her Wall Street Journal column "A Cuban fairy tale from PBS," noted here by Tim Graham at NewsBusters. O'Grady finds reporter Ray Suarez declaring the glories of Cuban health care in a three-part PBS NewsHour series last week. Suarez took the Potemkin village tour of the Cuban health care system; O'Grady notes that the NewsHour series was taped in Cuba...

Having been given the power to rule by decree for 18 months, Hugo Chávez appears to be in the midst of completing a de facto statist takeover of the country institutions and levers of power. No journalist is daring to directly call it dictatorship. You won't find any form of the word at a December 15 New York Times story by Simon Romero or at a December 17 Associated Press item by Fabiola Sanchez. In a Reuters story ("Venezuela assembly gives Chavez decree powers"), reporters Daniel Wallis and Frank Jack Daniel took note of outraged "opponents who accuse him of...

HAVANA - The conservative Tea Party movement, credited for a recent Republican resurgence in U.S. politics, is moving the United States towards fascism, Cuban leader Fidel Castro said in remarks published on Thursday. Speaking to a group of visiting students in Havana on Wednesday, Castro called his powerful neighbor a ruined nation "on the road toward fascism" thanks to the Tea Party, which he derided as an "extreme right" movement. Castro, 84, communism's most visible living figure, led Cuba from the 1959 Revolution until he stepped down for health reasons in 2006. His brother Raul is currently the president of...

The secret service agent who threw himself into President Kennedy's car at the moment of his assassination, Clint Hill, has published a book about the events.

NATO is a "military mafia," the war in Afghanistan is "genocidal" and US President Barack Obama deserves the prize for the "best snake charmer" who ever lived, Cuba's Fidel Castro said Monday. In an article published in response to the Western alliance's weekend summit in Portugal, the former Cuban leader called NATO an "aggressive institution" that ignored "billions of persons suffering from poverty, underdevelopment, shortages of food, housing, health, education and jobs." Castro, 84, communism's most visible living figure, led Cuba from the 1959 Revolution until he stepped down for health reasons in 2006, handing over the presidency to his...

HAVANA (AP) -- Cuba harshly criticized a new video game in which U.S. special operations soldiers try to kill a young Fidel Castro, saying Wednesday that the violent role-playing glorifies assassination and will turn American children into sociopaths. The island's state-run media also took a dig at the CIA's real-life efforts to do in the island's revolutionary leader, who has survived dozens, perhaps hundreds of attempts on his life. "What the United States couldn't accomplish in more than 50 years, they are now trying to do virtually," said an article posted on Cubadebate, a state-run news website.

Accept reforms or “we will fall off the cliff” warns Raúl Castro Cuban President Raul Castro told unionists to accept layoffs and reforms that open the way for private enterprise as necessary for the survival of socialism. Castro’s speech was published in the party newspaper Granma as Cuba prepares to dismiss 500,000 state workers by March, affecting 10% of the workforce. The dismissed workers are being encouraged to go into business for themselves, and Granma said the central bank may offer micro-credits to new entrepreneurs as the island faces its worst economic slump since the former Soviet Union ended support...