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Cuba’s new travel law a cynical ‘survival tactic’
Cuba’s new travel law – announced on Tuesday in Cuba’s official newspaper Granma - is being soft-peddled by the Associated Press and others as a historic first by the communist regime – a long-overdue reform giving Cubans the freedom to travel abroad for the first time in more than 50 years.
In reality, the new law is a survival tactic by the Castro regime.
It’s part of the same cynicism that was behind the Mariel boatlift in 1980 when 125,000 Cubans sailed to South Florida aboard private boats – including criminals and mental patients whom Fidel Castro had set loose. It’s part of the same cynicism that Castro demonstrated during the summer of 1984 — when he looked the other way as tens of thousands of Cubans built rafts to escape their tropical prison.
So says a clear-eyed analysis of the new travel law by Fabiola Santiago in today’s Miami Herald, “New travel law just another survival tactic for Castro.”
Stranded in Sonoma
October 18th, 2012
January 13th? I’m surprised it hasn’t already happened. I would have thought this migration would have been finished just before the FL residency requirements for voting ended.
Castro-ita missed the mark to help 0bama.
Maudie N Mandeville
October 18th, 2012
Fur- That truck needs the round Obama logo on it. ‘Defendiend el Socialismo. Obama 2012!’
judgeroybean
October 18th, 2012
Why not trade a few thousand Cubans, who would die for a taste of freedom, for a few thousand Americans who do not appreciate the freedoms so many of us suffered and died for? We could send them Michael Moore and his ilk, Cher, Babs, sluts from the View, Fluke, Pelosi, Feinstein, Clintons, a couple cruise ships full of professors, and most of Hollywood. Win-win.
Stranded in Sonoma
October 18th, 2012
@Maudie — That’s a bus and the slogan is on the white painted brick wall behind it.
Jason in SD
October 18th, 2012
One of the people in my Spanish class just returned from a trip to Cuba. According to him, everybody was happy and the literacy rate is 99% and even though you see doctors begging from the tourists, the economy is opening up–you can sell property to a private party without having to use the government as a clearing house. If they can keep the good parts of socialism (education, medicine) and increase the standard of living though tourism, it would be Eden.
I really like the class and respect the teacher which was why I forced a grin instead of telling him to leave and not come back.
Maudie N Mandeville
October 18th, 2012
@Stranded: Gotcha. I think it was the rainbow on the bus that threw me.
Death_By_Farts
October 18th, 2012
I’d like to see this truck try and drive through the State of Texas.
They wouldn’t get past Galveston…God help them if they made it to South Houston.
Major Mal function
October 19th, 2012
Of course it is. But it requires the cooperation of a president as stupid and anti-American as Jimmy Carter … Oh.