Posted on 02/03/2006 9:23:32 AM PST by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO — Assemblywoman Nicole Parra and her father traveled to Cuba in early December on what has reportedly become an annual event organized by one of California’s most powerful lobbyists and political fundraisers.
Parra, D-Hanford, and other participants said the trip was arranged by Darius Anderson, founder of one of Sacramento’s premiere lobbying firms and a top fundraiser for former Gov. Gray Davis.
Since travel to communist Cuba is generally prohibited except under a license from the U.S. government, Anderson’s repeated trips there with lawmakers, business people and others raise a number of questions.
Why is a lobbyist arranging religious trips and are they any kind of favor?
Anderson said all the participants in the trip paid their own way.
“I didn’t pay for anybody,” Anderson said in a brief interview that he ended abruptly after a reporter refused to allow him to speak off the record.
He declined to talk about the reasons for the trips, which must have a religious overtone under terms of the license granted for them.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported last December that the Anderson trips to Cuba have become an annual affair. Parra said she and her father, former Kern County Supervisor Pete Parra, paid for the trip, about $3,000 each plus airfare to Miami, out of personal funds.
The trip was a personal, educational vacation, Nicole Parra said.
At least one other lawmaker who attended, Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, said she used campaign funds, according to the Palm Springs Desert Sun.
Four other Assembly members were among the 100 people on the five-day trip, including the powerful speaker of the Assembly, Fabian Nunez, said Nunez spokesman Steven Maviglio.
Both Parra and Maviglio said the official sponsor of the trip was the Universal Life Church of Livermore. The Universal Life Church is best known for ordaining mail-order ministers, usually free or at low cost to anyone who wants to be ordained.
A phone call to the church was returned later by Robert Zuccato, an official of Long Beach-based Cuba Travel Services, one of a number of travel agencies across the country specializing in trips to Cuba.
Zuccato said his agency handles travel arrangements for the trips hosted by Anderson. The trips are made under a license issued by the U. S. Treasury Department to the Livermore church, Zuccato said.
Under regulations governing the license, Zuccato said participants in the trip had to agree to be involved full-time in religious activities during their three days on the Caribbean island nation.
He said the itinerary called for visits to both Catholic and Jewish churches and church-operated cemeteries, schools and day-care facilities.
That jibed with Parra’s description of the trip, which she said was highly educational for her. She said she was struck by the poverty among the Cuban people.
“Especially the schools,” she said. “You see no books. And the kids are sitting around on these cold, hard, concrete floors.”
Asked if she came back with any new opinions about whether the United States should recognize Cuba or lift travel and trade restrictions, she said, “That would really help the people, especially the children.”
“But I know there’s a long history of U. S.-Cuba relations,” she added.
Anderson, known for keeping a low profile despite his huge influence, heads Platinum Advisers, a lobbying and public affairs firm he founded in 1999, according to the firm’s Web site.
It represents a large number of major corporate clients as well as a company that builds and operates Indian casinos.
One of its clients is Bakersfield businessman Terry Moreland, who has built and operated private prisons. Anderson’s firm expanded rapidly when Davis was governor, the Chronicle has reported. He and Davis administration officials denied that Anderson abused that relationship for private gain.
However, he acknowledged in an interview with the Chronicle that he has lost some clients since Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor.
What a surprise! Nicole Parra is vacationing in Cuba every year. Don't bother emailing her, someone I know used to work for her and was in charge of those emails and the "delete" button. Nothing is ever tabulated, just deleted.
Hey, if she wasn't smart and articulate, we never would have elected her.
Since castro was boasting about the quality of his prostitutes I wonder what she is vactioning for down there...
I can bet she will be in the Gringo cloiser and will not have to see the starving masses.
Darius Anderson was also identified in reports as Susan Kennedy's "best friend" and also acted as the "best man" in her "wedding" to her lesbian partner.
This Parrademoslut is the very same one who, with her crooked Daddy, stole an election with phantom voters to take a seat in Sacramento. Her true constituency is dead, illegal, and totally imaginary Mexicans. I hope Fidel gives her a disease.
What happened to the old website? I never laughed so hard.
Because the “church” is a front - cover- that due to exemptions in the sanctions, allows it to sponsor legal travel to Cuba, so long as everyone plays along.
Fabian Nunez, who went on the trip sponsored by this kook social justice multireligion “church” that functions as a legal shield to get around sanctions on Cuba, was an Arnold Schwarzenegger’s buddy, and Arnold later commuted the murder sentence of Nunez’s son.
Schwarzenegger went goofy after marrying the Kennedy gal...
Trivia : this church is apparently of the same body as the ULC with which the 4th of July shooter Bobby Crim’s mother is involved. Bobby Crim had an interest in the Kennedy family too, as there is the photo or video of him with the newspaper that was printed about Lee Harvey Oswald being shot.
I can see a church that enables anyone to pay to be made a “minister” and can get travel exemptions for its members to travel to Cuba in spite of the embargo, might include members who are not fans of the 4th of July.
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