How touching.
Yankee Doodle Castro***Once we had Fidel the heroic champion of Third World peoples against the capitalist exploiters. Now it's Fidel the capitalist exploiters' King Pimp ... "Psssst, Meester Canadian? Pssst, Herr German? Psssst, Signorino Italiano? … You wan' my seester? ... first time for you, meester ... here's photo ... only 12 years old ... Nice, hunh?"
Havana recently topped Bangkok as "child-sex capital of the world." Consider the human tragedy, the desperation of poor people driven to such things in such numbers, and after 43 years of "liberation" and "national dignity."
18,000 riddled by firing squads. Half a million incarcerated. 50,000 drowned or ripped apart by sharks in the Florida Straits. Thousands more slaughtered in Africa for Moscow. Two million exiled. And we wind up with a nation that in 1959 had a higher living standard than Belgium or Italy, had a lower infant mortality rate than France, had net immigration, as child prostitution capital of the world.
Friends, are you beginning to understand why we get a trifle "emotional" or "unreasonable" when we hear some imbecile professor or boneheaded politician yapping about "the good things" Castro has done for Cuba?
Imagine chumming it up with people like Daniel Pearl's murderers. U.S. citizens are doing it daily nowadays – on every "fact finding" junket and "trade delegation" to Havana. Thousands more will stand in line for the privilege at the U.S. Food & Agribusiness Exhibition at Havana's Palacio de las Convenciones Sept. 26-30. "As many as 20,000 visitors are expected," reports the Miami Herald. Quite a hoedown.
These folks, especially those who coo and gurgle at Cuba's "literacy rate," will likely hobnob with some charming people. As a special treat, they might meet Cuba's current "minister of education," Fernando Vecino Alegret. This gentleman has an interesting background. Most probably the Communist tour guides, smiling and eager to make your stay as pleasant as possible, will neglect to mention it.
But the book "Honor Bound: American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973" does – and in some pretty explicit detail, I'm afraid. So I'll pass it along.
The authors describe Hanoi's "Cuba Project" at the Cu Loc POW camp known as "The Zoo" on the southwestern edge of Hanoi. In brief, this "Cuba Project " was a Joseph Mengelese experiment by Hanoi's Castroite allies to determine how much physical and psychological agony a human can endure before cracking. ***