That's great, they are very courageous. I am sure that some birkenstock in the faculty is going to take some revenge against them.
They kicked the heart of the beast, in one of the most liberal centers of the Ivy Leagues! MORE POWER TO THEM!

The kids are alright. They will outlive the scourge.

There was a Cuban Rap Artist, who a while back wrote an article on Che. He took a lot of flack from people because he is against this "Che is a Hero" crap.

MC Pitbull I think his name is.

Cuban-Americans are among the brightest and most accomplished of all Latinos. No surprise their kids get into places like Harvard and Princeton. There probably are a lot of them - on PubliusPundit the other day, I wrote about my Cuban-American roomate at Columbia U. Lately, we are getting a lot of email from bright Cuban-American students at those kinds of schools who are interested in publishing blogs about the real Cuba. The Miramar Project is one, and I just got a note from another bright Cuban-American kid at some ivy-league school who was beginning a blog.

My conclusion: Something Is In The Air. This is a real trend. Bye bye Che tee shirt on all you underachievers. So passe. Cuban-American, let's face it, is HOTT!

What's almost more amazing is that the Princeton Packet, the local paper, had this a the front-page top story of the day.
The Packet's been known to have front-page stories of people who go to Cuba & come back charmed by fidel.

I think I have said this in the past. Within Cuba the MOST vocal anti-Castro group I have seen are young men & women in their early to late 20s.
It amazes me how they tell stories of our past, as if they had been alive then. I guess they have heard these stories from parents & grandparents and they have become almost mythological.
I just spoke to my sister in law who is 16.. and her answer to innocuous “ Y como esta todo por allá?’ was “Esto esta hecha una fana!” SIXTEEN!

It is kind of eerie to drive around La Habana with someone who is 20 years old and he points to a decrepit building and says “The FORD dealership used to be HERE and they would show ALL new cars before they showed them in the USA!"
It is quite amazing. 46 years of indoctrination and these young men and women want what all men and women around the world want.. To PROSPER IN PEACE!
The biggest failure of communism is the total disregard for human survival. It is in our DNA. The BIG house, the new car, the 3 TV sets. No CastroGRANDA can alter who we are down to a cellular level.
And I just LOVE the name of the group “CAUSA”.
God bless them!

"Cuban-Americans are among the brightest and most accomplished of all Latinos"

Huh?

It depends how you define accomplished. Cuba was the only country in Latin America that sent us its elite. The rest of Latin America sends us its trash.

So then, the Cuban elite is the only Latin American elite which lost its country.

So, how smart and talented is that Cuban elite?

I've spent a lot of time in Cuba and Mexico. I've always wondered why Fidel & Che were so popular in Mexico.

Because there is no way a Fidel or Che could exist in Mexico. Someone would kill him ASAP.

Not the government, just a local rich guy protecting his turf.

How did Fidel manage to fool all these smart Cubans?

As a Latin American, not Cuban, Wotan, I take exception at your "the rest of Latin America sent us their trash".

Wotan.

As a Cuban aerospace engineer that works with a bunch of very bright and talented Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Argentinians, Spaniards, Costa Ricans, Nicaraguans, etc. engineers, scientists, and mathematicians for the American Space Program, I too take offense to that remark.

(Any other latinos working with me from countries not mentioned and I not aware of, I apologize but include yourselves too)

Castro did fool us smart ones here as well as the ones still there, as well as ten American presidents, seven Russian premiers, also fooled 190 member countries in the UN, hundreds of Hollywood's rich and famous and thousands of liberal, left slanting useful fools.

So I do not feel alone, or ashamed. Just mad.

However, the old saying

"Fool me once, shame on you!"
"Fool me twice, Shame on me!"

Seems to me wotan, you've been fooled twice!
As Gomer Pyle would say....

Shame, shame, shame!

Again time works well for those with the patience to wait. Some time ago one of the embargo adversaries blurted out the following in so many words to me:

A bunch of us young people are going to Washington DC and we are going to get the embargo dropped and since all you old anticastro Cubans are going the way of the dinosaurs and the young Cuban Americans really do not hold the same views, we will be sucessful as you old guys will soon be dead and out of the way and we will be dealing in friendly terms with fidel"

Princeton kids, I bow down to you, you make me proud. Genes do count for something, specially the Cuban ones.

DC useful idjit guys.... Hah hah!

Sound like you suffer from a little class resentment Wotan... and you sound condescending to your Mexican lady, too. Pitiful, pitiful...
Maybe I am mistaken and it's not some class complex, it's really that you're very honest and when you say trash, well, you mean trash. But don't assume that everybody (at least from Latin America) share your trashiness. That's pretty unique for you!
It makes me feel bad for you. You know, there's something called the American Dream, get a grasp of it, everybody can get everywhere, as long as they have the ambition and the drive for it, that's the big equalizer.
Some of the upper class Cubans you think you're seeing are not upper class. But they are not trash baby, they're not! Some of them came in boats, rafts, hiding in cargo, you name it. They can speak perfect Spanish and perfect English too.
Your little hints of envy are too evident. Maybe I can teach you some upper class tricks on how to conceal some of those not so nice feelings. Otherwise you come across as crass, not that it is anything wrong with that, it's just not as nice.
I guess that you speak Spanish because even somebody as trashy as you are likes to have a Spanish speaking maid. What a difference with the upper class Cubans who want exotic looking exotic language speaking nannies for their kids. Go eat your tamales in the kitchen and when you finish, remember to wrap the leaves in a photo of castro and guevara, and please, take out the trash!

That's another one of our upper class vices, Wotan. The libation of rum, that superior nectar that comes from the sugar cane, in case you didn't know!
I am sorry, I post as it pleases me. Get used to it.

Wotan: All kinds of people from Cuba came to the states and curiously enough, most of them got rich and accomplished in the states whether they were rich or poor when they came here. That's just the superiority of the culture. It gave Cubans a leg up. It's no coincidence that Venezuela's, Mexico City's and Puerto Rico's, Argentina's elites are often of Cuban extraction. Cubans rise to the top wherever they go.

But it's not a blanket statement about people's character - nor a predestination of one's fate. All individuals are different. Lots of good people come from unsuccessful cultures, like, say, Haiti or Honduras, and here in the US they make it big too. It all depends on one's opportunities and the ability to recognize them. Cubans are just more successful pretty quickly than most and it has NOTHING to do with how much cash was in their suitcase when they got here. It depends on whether they know how to create wealth, something fidel has no idea how to do.

Did you know that 10% of Mexico's population lives here in the states, but they count for half of the purchasing power of all Mexico? Opportunity dramatically increases one's power, purchasing power and success and most immigrants in general know a good thing when they see it - so, whatever their original disadvantages, they usually top the native born if they keep at it and know how to make the most of it.

Wow A.M., that's what I call "la estocada al corazon de Wotan", great post! Apparently he doesn't know that Cubans can only bring themselves to the US, no monies to be brought, it was always like that, confiscation and then exile!

As someone who came to the USA at 12 years old and the struggled to get my mother in (and she , my step dad) I can only say that the ONLY people who help us in the USA were Puerto Ricans. The looked after my mother (who had never worked a day in her life outside the house) found us shelter and food, ran around with us like lunatics trying to navigate the maze that was immigration at that time. The Cubans that WERE supposed to see us through the first phase turned out to be a bunch of pricks who tried to charge us for one room in the house as much as they paid for the whole house. So, as a Cuban I am grateful not only to Puerto Ricans, but to Colombians Ecuadorians and Mexicans for having helped me survive in NYC.
Now, as I have always said, Cuba's tragedy was the closeness to the USA, way too easy to pack up and for $45.00 come spend the 6 months Castro was going to be in power in sunny Miami.
Yes we were fooled and so was the rest of the world including the USA. At a time were political assassinations were standard foreign policy in the USA, noone could snipe out Castro? All of the stories about poisoned this and hair falling that are mostly romantic anecdotes made up to sell books. They (whoever THEY were) killed Kennedy but Castro they couldn’t touch ? The Cubans that remained after the first wave of the "Elite" left were dancers in a tragic game of international MAMBO.
It is a fact that as Latin Americans Cubans have reached a higher level of wealth that any other nationality, my only answer for that is that these Cubans worked a lot harder for the mere fact that they wanted to take the ones they left behind out of Cuba.
Some of the wealthiest Cubans I know actually were Marielitos . One, an engineer who spend the first 6 months in the USA pouring hot tar on roofing. Is he smarter than a Venezuelan counterpart , I don’t think so. His English STILL sucks :) He juts had more to prove , the angst that comes from being called a whore and a fag and having your 6 month baby almost die in your hands goes a long way on your capacity to survive.
My folks worked two jobs straight 16 hour days for 12 years and it was always for a reason, "you never know...."
So I totally disagree with Cubans being "smarter" I do think we are more driven but few of us would be were they are right now if it were not for the help of those other Latinos that came before us and were willing to lend a hand to a population that had lost it all.

Did we loose Cuba for being stupid? Hmmm , I think we were naive, I think Castro gave the Cuba of 1959 exactly what it wanted , PROMISES !. Castro is a great orator in a Country which worships oratory. Hell the father of the country is a POET who got killed on his first battle! It was an aberration and it just happens to have happened 90 miles from the USA.
So for all of you NON Cubans who may have taken exception to previous comments *I* as a Cuban thank you from the bottom of my heart. You saw a sick 39 year old woman and his 12 year old son and you fed us, sheltered us and gave us a life. For that I will be eternally in your debt.

After reading this post and Val's later re-post about painting, I thought it was interesting to read an article in today's Miami Herald "Neighbors" section about a successful Cuban welder from Miami. Covers both topics quite nicely.

Here's the URL: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/miami-dade/cities_neighborhoods/11262974.htm

Or just go to herald.com and click on the Neighbors section at the top. Site registration is free.

Wotan...

Extra, extra, heeearr al about it!
Latest from the US Department of Commerce, Dept. of Education, IRS, INS and US Census.

All put together in an easy to read and digest format, just for you!

So here we go...let me "lern yuh" a thing or two.

26.1% of second generation Cuban-Americans had a bachelor's degree versus 20.6% of Anglo Americans.

Which means to those in Hollyweird who can't do higher math, that we are 25% more likely than Anglos to have a college degree.

It is only 18.1% for South Americans living here,
11% for Puerto Ricans, and
7% for Mexicans.

In 1997 55.1 percent of second generation Cuban Americans had an income greater than $30 K Vs 44.1% of Anglo Americans. Which works out to 20% greater.

Are we paying attention now?

In 1997 36.9 percent of second generation Cubans had an income greater than $50 K versus 18.1% of Anglo Americans. Which works out roughly to twice as many.

Also, 11% of Cuban Americans had incomes greater than $100 K versus 9% for Anglos, and less than 2% for all other Hispanics.

Cubans comprise less than 4% of the US hispanic population, Mexicans 65%, Puerto Ricans 10%, Central and South Americans 11%, and "other" 10%.

Of the top 100 richest Hispanics in the US, more than 50% are of Cuban descent, (ten times what it should be on a population basis) and 38% of mexican descent. The remainder is scattered amongs all other Hispanic groups.

Not bad for a bunch of saltwater wetbacks eh?

Hell, even fidel, the consumate anti-capitalist murdering/thieving bastard SOB, has done very well in the world marketplace according to Forbes, is also a Cuban, which saddly has been a very unfortunate curse for us.

By the way wotan, these are Anglo-American statistics. We just provide the W2s and diplomas.

Wotan, keep trying hard and you may eventually make it too!

ta ta!

That's wonderful. Cuban-Americans will always have a special place in my heart. I see a lot of similarities between them and Ukrainian-Americans.
Check out this great anti-commie shirt I just bought

http://www.thoseshirts.com/commies.html

OEC