Posted on 12/17/2002 2:55:17 AM PST by kattracks
Many only had to sleep their way to the top but that explains why they're such whores.
When reading this article a scene from a movie immediately jumped out. It was nothing that any of these "Entertainers" ever had done, but it was the scene from Braveheart where Mel Gibson cries "Freedom".
As for redistribution of the wealth, there is none to resdestribute because the economy have been dead for four decades and any one that would know about ginning up the economy are dead or have been run off the island.
It hard to understand why these rich Americans treck down to Cuba, see ther deplorable conditions and say how quaint and happy the (handpicked) people are, but the are not willing to relocate to that utopia. Castro is a genius only in that he has been able to survive all the these years. Even if someone wants to call him a genius, that dose not absolve him of murder.
The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy. For real!
Makes perfect sense.
Exactly.
In Cuba they see nothing but what Castro wants them to see and they are, as Cubans say, such comemierdas that they cannot or will not see beyond that.
Pasted below are two postings from a few years ago on soc.culture.cuba. The poster was a New York Liberal now living in Seattle. We e-mailed and he and his friend Lois had Cuban Christmas Eve “Noche Buena” with us at our home one year. The story they told us that night of Lois in the Cuban Police station with her New York Liberal attitude and her friend telling her to shut the h*ll up in Pig Latin was hilarious.
They went to Cuba believing the Liberal propaganda. After three trips, they came to the conclusion that Castro was "a Fascist". They saw for themselves how the Cuban people are treated, in their own country, as blacks were treated in South Africa in the days of apartheid.
Cuba is essentially a feudal state with the Communist nobility living in one world and the peasantry living in another. Liberals like Steve and Lois travel amongst the peasants and learn. The Hollywood elite stay in the manor house feasting with the Communist nobility and learn nothing. ****************************************
It was the best vacation of my life. The people are wonderful; it is one of the best places in the world to visit....but the repression is getting really bad. I have so much to write that I barely know where to start.
Let me just sum up some of what happened to us briefly. When I recover from jetlag I will post in more detail.
We took a road trip to Guernevaca Beach. We were 5, 2 American guys, 1 American woman, 2 Cuban women. The Cubanas were immediately accosted by the police and told they couldn't accompany us to the beach. Everyplace we attempted to eat we were sent away. It is obvious the government wants to keep the tourist beaches sterile with no interaction.
Lois went to Baracoa with a German and a Cuban man. She made the mistake of taking lots of pictures and befriending a homosexual. She was detained, maybe arrested for a brieftime. Her male friend was thrown in jail.
After we moved out of our hotel where the hot water was sporadic and the food was terrible and we weren't allowed Cuban guests, 2 Ministerio de Interior Officials visited our private house and told us to report to the Immigration Office the next morning. There we were told our Visas said we had to stay in hotels (not true). They later checked to make sure we had moved out.
Police came to the casa particulare looking for Lois the next day, scaring the daylights out of our friends. At their request we completely erased all of our videotape to keep them from being compromised.
The place is becoming a Fascist state. It appears to me that Castro is getting scared and tightening the screws.
Even back here I am afraid to tell everything for fear of retribution against my friends.
****************************************************
Five of us set out for our trip, 3 Americans (2 male, 1 female), and 2 Cubanas. The road from Santiago is wide, at least the first few miles, but pretty much unmarked with absolutely no lights. Of course, there are no streetlights in Santiago to speak of either.
You need to stop every time there is an intersection because there are no signs.
My novia's brother lives in Bayamos so that was our first stop. Even though it is only an hour from Santiago she hadn't seen him for 5 years. Very few Cubans ever get to travel that far. Most of them have never left their own town.
Auspiciously, amazingly, perhaps miraculously, we arrived about half an hour after her brother had been in a motorcycle accident. Details were lacking; all we could find out was that he was in the local clinic. As it turned out, the details weren't lacking because of the severity of his injury (a broken collarbone), but because he was riding with his girlfriend and not his wife.
The clinic was breathtakingly bad. Forget about looking for a receptionist. You find someone milling in the crowd and ask for directions. The place was dingy, dark, and not very clean, although there were people constantly mopping and trying to make the best of the situation. Different rooms had handlettered signs on the door for orthopedics, etc. I went to the bathroom, and there was no soap or toilet paper, normal in Cuba, but in a hospital, too? There were bloodsoaked bandages in the trash.
The brother was on a bed in orthopedics, groaning from the pain. Fortunately my friend Jorge had a large bottle of ibuprofin which we immediately donated to the cause.
Lois was shooting pictures incessantly, which I thought was a little tasteless, but she insisted that she was an "artiste" and "journalist." I don't know what the people thought, but nobody said anything to her.
After determining that he would be okay for now, and probably operated on tomorrow, we paid $6 to the doctor (for God knows what?) and continued on our trip, promising to return on the way back the next day.
Our next stop was Holguin, where my first observation as a driver was that the place was teeming with bicycles. Holguin is much flatter than Santiago and presumably easier on cyclists. As a result we just inched along, feeling rather like we were driving in China!
We stopped in a hotel, where we dropped off Loisa, and were informed not surprisingly that the Cubans could not stay there. So we set out to find private houses to stay in. Almost immediately a guy on a bicycle volunteered to find us one, so we drove through the streets following him. One after another was already full (a sign of something I guess). Eventually we found nice accomodations run by a young guy in his 20's. We called him Calvin, because he wore a CK t-shirt. He looked kind of American or Canadian really, in his t-shirt, BlueJays cap, shorts and sneakers.
This was his job, renting out his house. He informed us he made much more money doing this than he ever could working a job. We invited him out to dinner with us.
Dinner was at a Paladar nearby, on a rooftop. We also managed to score some gasoline there for 50 cents a gallon, half the official rate. We bought 30 liters, literally, because he arrived with 10 liter bottles which he filled 3 times. Our guide, who had originally found us the house to live in, almost got us killed when he insisted on lighting a cigarette while this was going on. We decided from thereon that he was crazy and kept our distance. He had apparently made enough commission to also eat at the Paladar, so he was still around.
Food was pretty good although the selection was limited to ham or chicken. Not uncommon. Jamon seems to be the national meat of Cuba! Dinner was about $3 to $4 plus $1 for beers.
The house was comfortable enough, and even had hot water. One of those electrical-wired jobbies that they use in Cuba; I don't think they have even heard of hot water tanks there. (I have written about plumbing in Cuba before and will probably again, it's one of my favorite subjects about Cuba. They have all these beautiful fixtures from which a dribble comes out if you are lucky. Everybody has non-functioning bidets, harking back to a more golden age).
Cuba is a nation of noise, whether it is the street noise of central Havana with mothers yelling out for their children and people tuning up their mufflerless cars, or the noise of animals such as roosters, sheep, goats, and dogs in Santiago. In Holguin we were woken up to the sounds of schoolkids reciting their vowels over and over.....a,e,i,o,u. My Spanish is bad enough that I even joined in after giving up the idea of sleeping.. We discovered we were only a few blocks from the town center, where people had set up tables selling all kind of goods, from shoes to hardware. There was one very long line at the money-changing center. In front of many of the "stores" people were holding up little things that they were themselves selling, panties, pencils, whatever. And always shoes.
Jorge finally figured out why everybody in Cuba always wants shoes. It's because they have to walk so much.
We found a little place where we could buy breakfast, and then set out on the rest of our trip. About halfway to Guernavaca we ran into a procession of hundreds of Italian cyclists, who had a police escort and a bus following behind them with their supplies. Obviously the cyclists were not too popular with us, and we all exchanged anti-Italian stories, as we had to lag behind them for miles until we got to the beach.
There are 3 resorts on Guernavaca Beach, catering to tourists obviously, one of them being the Canadian-run Delta. We chose the so-called public beach, but the 2 Cuban women were immediately spotted by the cops who told them they could not go to the beach with us. This whole thing was infuriating, because Cubans were on the beach, they just couldn't go because they were with us. I took a quick swim on the beach, which by the way is a beautiful place; one of the few white sand beaches I have been to in Cuba. Then we set out to find something to eat and met the same problem. Cubans could not eat at the restaurants either. Loisa had a little bit of a shouting match over this and ended up eating by herself at one of the restaurants. She later told us the food was terrible and espensive anyway. We stopped at a store and purchased bread, cheese, and sardines from Spain. So much for our trip to the beach.
I stopped at the Delta to visit my friend Ana Maria who is the Canadian Holidays Representative. I knew her from when she had that job at the Balnearol del Sol outside Santiago. She was very surprised to see us and delighted. We shared our tales of woe with her and she had one for us herself. Even her Cuban husband was not allowed to stay at the hotel with her. He lived in the tenements across the street, so we went to visit him for awhile. He shared a small apartment with some toothless men whom he introduced as his "drinking club." It was a fun time and made our problems less bothersome.
This was the first time I was exposed to the art of rice-cleaning. All Cubans spend a great deal of time cleaning their rice. They lay it out flat on a tray and pick these little black things out of it. I don't know what they are: bugs, dirt, whatever, rice doesn't come all sanitized like it does here. We smoked some cigars drank beer, and then hit the road again.
On the way back we stopped in Bayamos; the brother was still in the hospital having had surgery; his wife wasn't going to leave him, but she would definitely take care of business. We went to a little Paladar for dinner. The food was great and cheap of course. We had chicken and ham and beer! What else is there?
Then we drove home, discovering that driving in the dark is even more of a challenge. At one point on the small 2-lane road I thought about passing, but saw a glimmer of lights ahead so thought better of it. When we reached the glimmer it turned out to be a truck parked on the highway with his parking lights on. So I was a hero.
We had to stop several times to make sure we were still on the road to Santiago. You don't know dark until you have driven in Cuba. By the time I got back to Santiago I was a wreck, my hands stuck to the wheel, but still I was happy that at least I was the one driving.
Considering that hundreds of thousands of Cubans left Cuba for Miami, that would have made 1958 Cuba the richest country that ever existed on the Planet Earth.
My uncle fought with Castro against Batista in the Sierra Maestra because Castro had promised to restore the democratic Constitution of 1940 that Batista had killed. After he discovered that Castro was a Communist fraud, he came to the U.S. and then fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs. After his release as a Bay of Pigs POW, he returned to the U.S., joined the U.S. Army and then served two combat tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret. After he retired from the Army, he stayed active in anti-Castro and anti-Communist activities.
You do not get that kind of fire in your belly simply because you are "an ex-millionaire who lost a plantation".
Such fire in the belly is usually produced by ideas that go by names such as Liberty and Freedom.
For the same reason that such a small group as the Jews makes such a vocal and influential impact on the federal psyche.
Cubans are financially successful, they contribute financially to politicians that support their cause, they take their politics very seriously and they get out the vote.
If the Cubans in Florida had not had not given Bush 80% of their vote, Al Gore would be President of the United States right now.
Stick that in your impact pipe and smoke it.
Tell ya what, Jake, you start making that kind of a difference and politicians will start paying attention to you too. Until then, you'll just have to settle for boiler-plate form letters thanking you for your opinion whenever you write your Congressman.
That might not be fair but that is the way the American political system has worked since way before you were ever born.
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