I'm surprised you didn't post the one with "the car in front of them". Or the one of them eating lobster by the beach, while the Cuban people starve for a piece of bread!
It saddens me that these are my peers, American University students.
Once again, I am firm in considering myself American by birth, but Cuban by choice.

Amanda, remember also that yes, you are American by birth, but you are Cuban because you were born of Cuban parents, the same ones who made the choice to be Americans.

I love it - "educational" trips to an island were everything is controlled by the State - a communist monopoly over everything - there are no private institutions allowed in Cuba - SO in reality these foolish American students won't get both sides of the story or another POV - they will only be fed the Kastro Kuban Kommunist (KKK) party line. PROPAGANDA will be fed to them between puffs of Cohibas and sips of Havana Club rum and the merits of free education and low infant mortality rate. How fair is that? How educational is that? It's like having a bunch of German students take an educational exchange trip to the USA and only being "educated" on a fringe wacko group like the American Nazi Party or the equally wacked out Communist Party USA as the only gospel truth to political life in the States.

This proffesor and students are not so innocent - even though they are ignorant - if they did not come back to America disgusted with Fidel's Cuba they are as quilty as a communist human rights abuser or someone who says the Nazis never put Jews in concentration camps!

Linking to this post later today. Devastating analysis...as usual. Thanks.--scott

Val,
A choice that I will be forever grateful. I am proud of being both, it's the ignorance and blindness of Americans and other nationalities who are blinded by Castro's propaganda and lies that infuriates me, and makes my Cuban side shine brighter.

Excellent post!

Those pictures are disgusting and evoke a strong response, even though I'm not Cuban. I can't begin to imagine what the island's inhabitants are thinking and feeling.

Me? I'd be saving up for a weapon of any kind so that I could wipe the grins off those faces.

Violent? Yes. But that's my gut response. I keep wondering: Why aren't the Cuban people violent?? They endure so, so much! :(

WOW - I had not seen all the pictures on this link - I knew it was bad but not that bad to the point of these creeps frolicking so much in Cuba. Most gross were the shots of the blanquita bimbos - each with a bottle of HAVANA CLUB RUM in one hand and a big fat cigar in their mouths. Talk about an oral fixation! I know for sure no studying went on there! That is the gist of most of these student trips anywhere. I can imagine who these bimbos took back to their rooms. I am sick and tired of Cuba being used as some pleasure floating bar bordello for ignorant a moral assholes. I couldn't believe the photo of the Anglo bimbos sunning their pale big mid western asses on a restricted Cuban beach looking like whores from a BangBros prono movie. Do they deserve a place in hell for this.

Can you imagine if this was done during 1980s South African apartheid and a bunch of stupid white kids went to study medicine in an Afrikaner university. OUTRAGE! But because it's Cuba its OK and trendy and no one gives a shit.

In a way it's the fault of the Cuban American community for not raising enough HELL to protest these actions. It's not just one school that does this. EVERY major college and even community colleges make these trips all around the year with their baby boomer proffesors. There must be HUNDREDS if not more that go to Cuba.

Did you ever hear of the infamous semester at sea where HUNDREDS of American college students docked in Havana - it was in the news - Castro came to invite them for lunch - the bimbo American college students even lined up to give that "cute old man" Fidel a hug and a kiss!

The Left has a long tradition (many decades) of visiting totalitarian regimes and coming back to the West with glowing praise.

See, for example, Paul Hollander's book Political Pilgrims: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195029372/qid=1099003103/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/102-1353140-0500906?v=glance&s=books

It would be amusing if it weren't so very very sick.

Isn't choosing to join the "Virology Club" pretty fucked up even without this?

Val, I met the same sort of morons when I was traveling in the USSR. Intourist wasn’t part of the MoD, it was pure KGB. My ugliest memories of the place were from the tour group on my first trip. I don’t know what it is about Americans of college age, but regardless of their politics, they are often complete idiots. Well, I do have an idea, but it’s a complicated issue. Getting their nose rubbed in their own bad behavior helps. Good for you.

After the bad mannered frat boys and sorority chicks went back to college in the US, I stayed on for another 18 months. Some of my best memories of the USSR were of staying in a cockroach-infested student dorm of the Moscow Electrical Engineering Institute. Sitting in our first dorm floor meeting were a few obvious non-Russians. When I went up to talk to them they said they were Cubans. They’d been in Russia about 4 years, and when I asked when they were going back to Cuba, they looked at me like I had just dropped in from the planet Idiot. People with technical educations were watched like a hawk, so really the only way to get off the island was to go for continuing education behind the iron curtain. Finding themselves in a country colder than the proverbial Wiccan mammary gland, with shortages of everything from boots to razors, they considered themselves lucky. There was no way they were going back to their tropical paradise.

We spent a great summer teaching the Russians how to play baseball. An experience in real-world relationships the lefty Russian Studies tourists never got. When I moved up North, the Cubans left MEI, and I lost touch. I often wonder what happened to those guys. I hope they made their way here, eventually.