June 28, 2005

So you wanna go to Cuba, eh?

Here's a first hand account I just recieved from a reader via email:

Some years ago I got a catalog from a Canadian company offering trips to Cuba. My husband and I thought it sounded interesting and signed up. After all my family lived in Coral Gables in the winter and talked about Cuba all the time since it was a favorite destination. I have movies of Cuba. My brother learned Spanish there.

We were not in the country for an hour when we realized we had just signed up to visit a vast jail. All my parent's descriptions of Havana and their favorite hang outs were there but the streets were filled with sullen people and despite all the countries I have visited, and they are 50 in number, I have never seen such rampant prostitution. Despite some efforts to smarten up downtown it was a tired city, the Corniche was practically in ruins and the countryside was worse with those air conditioned dollar stores next to shabby tiendas offering a few onions and oil and rice rations. We visited a botanical garden which had been the summer home of a friend's family and when I mentioned it I was given a look of such hatred I still remember it. We would have gone home immediately and even thought of faking some illness to get out but ten days later we were in Toronto where American customs pounced on us. Last year the government fined us $2,000 for the visit and my husband said it was one fine he was glad to pay because we never should have gone and hated every minute of it.

So thank you Mr. Branson for adding to the vast tourist pool of eager sex tourists and for the moral degradation of having my husband accosted by two 13 year old girls offering to have sex with him.

But there is one thing I remember and it was always one of the things my family talked about. There was music everywhere, wonderful music that was pouring out from every door and window. It reminded me of Merida in the Yucatan when they sing the melodies of Cuba. Keep up the blog. It's great!


Posted by Val Prieto at June 28, 2005 04:58 PM



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Can someone please explain to me how this is possible? In that paradise of Cuba: 2000 privately run snack shops have been shut down and will be replaced with a state sandwich service. Prepared food can only be sold legally [Read More]

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Comments

"So thank you Mr. Branson for adding to the vast tourist pool of eager sex tourists and for the moral degradation of having my husband accosted by two 13 year old girls offering to have sex with him."

During the Nuremberg trials, Hans Frank (Governor of Poland during the Third Reich) said that "a thousand years shall pass and the guilt of
Germany will not be erased." Reading about current events in Cuba reminds me of this quote on a daily basis. fidel castro, his brother raul, alarcon, and the rest will someday be brought to justice like the Nazis at Nuremberg. For them, the gallows would be their appropriate end. It may well be that a thousand years have to pass before the terrible evil these men have done in Cuba is forgotten, let alone erased.

Posted by: George L. Moneo at June 28, 2005 05:05 PM

And their souls will roast in hell far longer than that.
Julio

Posted by: Julio C. Zangroniz at June 28, 2005 05:27 PM

I personally don't believe in the death penalty. I believe it was abolished in Cuba before castro's revolution. Then the triumph of the revolution brought back executions (by firing squad). I think a much more fitting punishment would be for them to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives having to hear the insults of their victims and their victim's families for 12 hours a day.

Posted by: conductor at June 28, 2005 11:08 PM

THE NEXT MILLION MARCHERS...
If fidelito mobilizes another anti-U.S. march in Havana, if they can be incited to march on the Capital and demand the ouster of the government...there will be enough strength in numbers to perhaps depose that cockroach.

If he dies before he is overthrown, it will be announced in the World's newspapers as if he were a hero. They won't note that he has destroyed the two main industries in which Cuba was self-sufficient and able to export for profit, cattle and sugar. No, they'll blame the U.S. for all his failures.

Posted by: Howarde at June 29, 2005 05:00 AM