CUBAN FOR MIN: US Has Much to Learn from Cuba and is in No Position to Lecture Anybody

[magbana]

http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/english/news/art10.html

GRANMA
June 9, 2008

The U.S. Government Has Much to Learn from Cuba
and Is in No Position to Lecture Anybody

• Statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

ON June 4, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presented her annual
report on human trafficking for 2008, in which, for the sixth consecutive
year, the United States government included Cuba among the countries it
accuses of not making significant efforts to confront the alleged
trafficking of women and children for the purpose of sexual exploitation,
and described our country as a sexual tourism destination, among other
serious and unfounded accusations.

For the first time, the imperial power also decided to include in this
report several recommendations to the Cuban government as to how to confront
the phenomenon.

At the same time, the report threatened sanctions against those countries
accused of failing to meet the secretary of state’s requirements on the
issue, denying them U.S. government aid, something which is of little
relevance to Cuba, having been subjected for over 50 years to these and
other measures, as part of the policy of blockade implemented so rigorously
and cruelly in an attempt to defeat the Cuban people.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs categorically rejects the contents of this
new State Department report which denies and distorts Cuban realities in an
effort to justify the U.S. government’s criminal blockade of, aggression and
hostility against Cuba.

The report attempts to denigrate the social and moral work of the Cuban
Revolution, in particular, the priority afforded women and children, broadly
recognized on an international level. It also presumes to discredit the
healthy and growing development of our tourist industry, to which the U.S.
market has absolutely no access, and which that government is trying to
undermine by all means in its reach.

The U.S. government, and in particular the Bush administration, which has
consistently attacked the human rights of the Cuban people, has no moral
basis or credibility for accusing Cuba and much less for presenting cynical
recommendations as to what our country should do in this context.

Cuba does not recognize any value whatsoever in the content of the State
Department report, conscious that, thanks only to the work of the Revolution
and despite the policies of the United States, since 1959, we have been able
to raise the social well-being of our population to unprecedented levels.

The attempt to disparage Cuba’s image and its tourist industry and ignore
the policy developed by the Cuban government to prevent all types of social
ills within this sector and severely punish those responsible for such
reprehensible behavior, can only be explained by the U.S. government’s
obsession with denying and attempting to stop anything that represents
progress for our country, its economy or its society.

It was precisely the Revolution which eliminated forever the conditions that
promoted sexual tourism and other related social ills that previously
existed in our country and were exacerbated by the neocolonial domination
imposed on Cuba until 1959 by Yankee imperialism.

The United States government has much to do within its own country to
confront the rampant incidence there of prostitution, sexual exploitation,
forced labor and trafficking in persons.

It is light years away from the guarantees Cuba provides its citizens, above
all children, women and the elderly, in the areas of health, education,
security and social well-being.

The U.S. government has much to learn from Cuba and is in no position to
lecture anybody.

Havana, June 8, 2008

[EFerrari]

1. This is the same State Department that is holding up the repatriation

of Guantanamo detainees until Bush is out of office.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Look, over there! Human traffickers!

Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery

The United States of America (USA) < Country-by-Country Reports >

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimates that 50,000 people are trafficked into or transited through the U.S.A. annually as sex slaves, domestics, garment, and agricultural slaves.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

3. Whereas the Cuban government is perfectly placed to lecture others on human rights...

The Cuban government may have done some good things, but it is still a repressive dictatorship, and too many on the left are willing to overlook this.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Many "on the left" may very well have invested far more of their lives learning about Cuba

than you.

Amazing how you have enough venom to hate what you perceive to be the government of an island which as been the target of over 45 years of wave after wave of terrorism from the U.S., while staggering under a filthy burden of economic warfare loaded upon it, which has been denounced all over the world by other countries as being illegal in international law, and denounced by the Pope on his visit to Cuba, yet you still have enough left over to presume you have a keen grasp of how well people who believe in Cuba's right to self-government actually perceive reality.

You make gross assumptions about others, and you feel obligated to share your devaluation of their mental and/or moral abilities. What's not to like about that?

You owe it to yourself to spend some of your valuable time getting a good foundation on the history of U.S. policy all over Latin America. You will see there are so many, MANY people who don't appreciate any part of U.S. meddling and U.S. violence against people who don't want to be beaten down and dominated.

Awakened Americans don't appreciate it, either.

The very idea that you posture and promote your country's right-wing Latin America policy as the model of freedom, of respect for people is abhorrent.

[Zorro]

5. I'm with you

It is a repressive dictatorship, and not the worker's paradise that certain posters with axes to grind and their dittomonkey drones continue to assert ad nauseum.

[Mika]

7. And your vast experience* in Cuba will be considered on this topic

* - as in: none

[Zorro]

8. Human Rights Watch agrees with me

<snip>

Over the past forty years, Cuba has developed a highly effective machinery of repression. The denial of basic civil and political rights is written into Cuban law. In the name of legality, armed security forces, aided by state-controlled mass organizations, silence dissent with heavy prison terms, threats of prosecution, harassment, or exile. Cuba uses these tools to restrict severely the exercise of fundamental human rights of expression, association, and assembly. The conditions in Cuba's prisons are inhuman, and political prisoners suffer additional degrading treatment and torture. In recent years, Cuba has added new repressive laws and continued prosecuting nonviolent dissidents while shrugging off international appeals for reform and placating visiting dignitaries with occasional releases of political prisoners.,,,

...Cuban authorities continue to treat as criminal offenses nonviolent activities such as meeting to discuss the economy or elections, writing letters to the government, reporting on political or economic developments, speaking to international reporters, or advocating the release of political prisoners. While the number of political prosecutions has diminished in the past few years, Cuban courts continue to try and imprison human rights activists, independent journalists, economists, doctors, and others for the peaceful expression of their views, subjecting them to the Cuban prison system's extremely poor conditions. Even as Cuba released some political prisoners early in 1998—most of whom had completed most of their sentences—continuing trials replenished their numbers. Prison remained a plausible threat to any Cubans considering nonviolent opposition. In the case of four dissident leaders arrested in July 1997 and only tried—for inciting sedition—in March 1999, receiving sentences ranging fromthree and one-half to five years, the arbitrariness of Cuban repression was starkly on display....

...The Cuban Criminal Code lies at the core of Cuba's repressive machinery, unabashedly prohibiting nonviolent dissent. With the Criminal Code in hand, Cuban officials have broad authority to repress peaceful government opponents at home. Cuban law tightly restricts the freedoms of speech, association, assembly, press, and movement. In an extraordinary June 1998 statement, Cuban Justice Minister Roberto Díaz Sotolongo justified Cuba's restrictions on dissent by explaining that, as Spain had instituted laws to protect the monarch from criticism, Cuba was justified in protecting Fidel Castro from criticism, since he served a similar function as Cuba's "king."

<snip>

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/cuba/

Oh yeah, you're the one that thinks HRW is a tool of the US administration, right? Well, just keep right on deluding yourself, comrade.

[Mika]

10. Then please tell us how HRW gets its info on Cuba. They aren't even there.

Like you, HRW has no vast experience in or about Cuba. Like you, they rely on 2nd & 3rd hand hearsay.


As far as your comment directed at me ... projection*.

* - 6b --> http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/projection

[Zorro]

11. Reporters Sans Frontieres agrees with me, too

<snip>

The human rights situation has not improved in the year and half Raúl Castro has been standing in as president for his ailing brother Fidel. However the form of repression has changed, to daily brutality and brief detention. Two journalists were freed in 2007 but two others were imprisoned. Three foreign journalists were forced to leave the country...

...On the repression front, only the methods changed. About 80 physical attacks, threats, arrests and unannounced searches involving journalists were recorded in 2007. The regime no longer stages major trials of dissidents but uses routine brutality. Six journalists - including Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, correspondent for the websites Payolibre and Nueva Prensa and for Radio Martí - were among some 30 government opponents arrested at a peaceful demonstration in Havana on 27 September to support political prisoners. They were freed the next day. Guerra Pérez was jailed in July 2005 after an earlier dissident protest, and on 9 May 2007 he completed a 22-month prison sentence for “disturbing the peace.” His trial took place three months before he was freed. Armando Betancourt Reina, of Nueva Prensa Cubana and founder of the small underground paper El Camagueyano, was released on 20 August after 15 months in prison, also learned he had been convicted of “disturbing the peace” just a few weeks before his release...

...Two new imprisonments preceded these two releases, keeping the number of journalists in jail at 24 and ensuring the country remained the world’s second biggest prison for journalists after China. Raymundo Perdigón Brito, of the Yayabo Press agency, had already been imprisoned for four years on 5 December 2006 for being a “pre-criminal danger to society.” Ramón Velázquez Toranso, of the Libertad agency, was sentenced on 23 January 2007 to three years in prison for the same offence. This accusation, often used against dissidents, allows them to be arrested and jailed as a “potential risk” to society. Oscar Sánchez Madán, a regular correspondent for the website Cubanet, was arrested by state security police and sentenced on 13 April in the absence of a lawyer to four years in prison for the same reason. He was the third journalist imprisoned since Raúl Castro took over and staged a hunger-strike in January 2008...

<snip>

More at:http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=25587

Yeah, Cuba -- land of the free, if you ignore the reported FACT that Cuba is THE WORLD'S SECOND BIGGEST PRISON FOR JOURNALISTS AFTER CHINA.

Now I suppose you're gonna also whine that RSF doesn't have a "vast experience" in or about Cuba, too? That they rely on 2nd and 3rd hand hearsay, also?

Sorry comrade, I'm not buying your snake oil, and neither is anyone else except the brainless and easily gullible.

Mwahahahahhaahaha!!

[EFerrari]

20. Reporters Without Borders? You mean, THIS RSF?

Funding Sources

Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF's budget was primarily provided by "US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy" (Thibodeau, La Presse).

* NED (US$39,900 paid 14 Jan 2005)
* Center for a Free Cuba (USAID and NED funded) $50,000 per year NED grant. Contract was signed by Otto Reich
* European Union (1.2m Euro) -- currently contested in EU parliament
* Rights & Democracy in 2004 supported Reporters Without Borders-Canada <1>

"Grants from private foundations (Open Society Foundation, Center for a Free Cuba, Fondation de France, National Endowment for Democracy) were slightly up, due to the Africa project funded by the NED and payment by Center for a Free Cuba for a reprint of the banned magazine De Cuba." <2>

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders

[Judi Lynn]

21. Sad, isn't it? Anyone who takes the time to find out about them KNOWS what they're up to.

Yet they're claimed to be pure as the driven snow, simply beyond reproach. Not shady! Not cheesy, sleazy, or political!



Robert Ménard


The deceit of Reporters Without Borders
by Salim Lamrani
Global Research, November 7, 2007

How is it that Eritrea, where only two journalists were murdered, ended up ranked below Iraq (157), Mexico (136), Somalia (159), Pakistan (152), Afghanistan (142) and Sri Lanka (156)? Perhaps because that nation is on Washington’s black list and RSF receives funding from the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy, NED? (7)

Likewise what is the explanation for Cuba ranking 165 when not one journalist has been killed there since 1959? Why is this nation ranked below Iraq, Mexico, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil (84), China (163), United States (48), Haiti (75), Nepal (137), Paraguay (90), Peru (117), Democratic Republic of the Congo (133), Turkey (101) and Zimbabwe (149), where at least one journalist has been killed? RSF explains that Cuba’s poor ranking is due to journalists being imprisoned. Just supposing the organization is correct on this point –which is actually far from being the case-, wouldn’t killing journalists still be more serious than imprisoning them? (8)

RSF is so obsessed with Cuba that it does not hesitate in blatantly contradicting itself. For example RSF considers China –where one journalist was killed - to be “largest journalist prison in the world” with 33 media professionals in detention and 50 “cyber dissidents” imprisoned, all figures according to the organization, is ranked above Cuba. How can RSF expect to be taken seriously? Perhaps this malice could be explained by the fact that RSF receives financial support from the extreme right Cuban organization Center for a Free Cuba (which itself is abundantly financed by Washington) whose president, Frank Calzón, is a former leader of the terrorist organization Cuban American National Foundation. (9)

In addition, how can Venezuela’s rank of 114 be explained? Even though not one journalist was killed there, Venezuela ranks below Brazil, United States, Haiti, Paraguay and Turkey where at least one journalist did lose their life. How can this rank be justified when in Venezuela the press enjoys a freedom that would not be tolerated in even the largest western democracy (some private media have openly called for the assassination of President Chávez on various occasions)? Perhaps it is just part of RSF’s propaganda war against President Hugo Chávez, the U.S.’s central target in Latin America. (10)

What has happened in Bolivia to cause this nation to fall from 16th in 2006 to 68 a year later? Where journalist killed? Where private media sources closed? Nothing of the sort. But President Evo Morales, who has launched spectacular economic and social reforms, is now in Washington’s sites. RSF, faithful to its principals, follows the lead of its sponsors and vilifies all the progressive and popular governments of Latin America. (11)

Likewise, how can the classification of Iran (166), where not one journalist was killed, be explained except by the fact that this country is part of the axis of evil designated by Bush? Why is the U.S. (48 and 111) separated into two categories (national territory and extra-territorial)? What other reason could RSF have to make this distinction other than the obvious objective of exonerating the U.S. for violations committed in territories it occupies? (12).

As one can easily see, Reporters Without Borders is not a reliable source. Its hidden political agenda has become all too evident and its malice toward certain nations that are on the U.S. blacklist is hardly a matter of coincidence. The generous contributions received from the NED explain RSF’s alignment with the White House. Robert Menard does not direct an organization that defends press freedoms, but instead a propaganda office financed by economic and financial conglomerates at the service of the world’s powerful.

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7274

[Zorro]

22. So are you denying the reported FACTS?

For being such an opinionated loudmouth on Latin American threads, you certainly are studiously avoiding answering the question regarding the accuracy of RsF's report.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Mika, they may be getting it from that fabled, and fabulous organization, RSF!

Reporters Without Borders Unmasked
May 27, 2005 By Diana Barahona

When Robert Menard founded Reporters Without Borders twenty years ago, he gave his group a name which evokes another French organization respected worldwide for its humanitarian work and which maintains a strict neutrality in political conflicts ­ Doctors Without Borders. But RSF (French acronym) has been anything but nonpartisan and objective in its approach to Latin America and to Cuba in particular.

From the beginning, RSF has made Cuba its No. 1 target. Allegedly founded to advocate freedom of the press around the world and to help journalists under attack, the organization has called Cuba "the world's biggest prison for journalists." It even gives the country a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico. RSF has waged campaigns aimed at discouraging Europeans from vacationing in Cuba and the European Union from doing business there ­ its only campaigns worldwide intended to damage a country's economy.

The above is not a matter of chance because it turns out that RSF is on the payroll of the U.S. State Department and has close ties to Helms-Burton-funded Cuban exile groups.

As a majority of members of Congress work toward normalizing trade and travel with Cuba, the extremist anti-Castro groups that have dictated U.S. Cuba policy for 40 years continue working tirelessly to maintain an economic stranglehold on the island. Their support for RSF is part of this overall strategy.

Havana-based journalist Jean-Guy Allard wrote a book about RSF's leader (El expediente Robert Ménard: Por qué Reporteros sin Fronteras se ensaña con Cuba, Quebec: Lanctí´t, 2005) which lays out the pieces of the puzzle regarding Menard's activities, associations and sources of funding in an attempt to explain what he calls Menard's "obsession" with Cuba. On April 27 this year the pieces began to come together: Thierry Meyssan, president of the Paris daily, Red Voltaire, published an article in which he claimed Menard had negotiated a contract with Otto Reich and the Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) in 2001. Reich was a trustee of the center, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The contract, according to Meyssan, was signed in 2002 around the time Reich was appointed Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere for the Secretary of State. The initial payment for RSF's services was approximately 24,970 euros in 2002 ($25,000), which went up to 59,201 euros in 2003 ($50,000).

Lucie Morillon, RSF's Washington representative, confirmed in an interview on April 29 that they are indeed receiving payments from the Center for a Free Cuba, and that the contract with Reich requires them to inform Europeans about the repression against journalists in Cuba and to support the families of journalists in prison. Morillon also said they received $50,000 from the CFC in 2004 and that this amount was consistent from year to year. But she denied that the anti-Cuba declarations on radio and television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies, posters, leafletting at airports and an April 2003 occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris were aimed at discouraging tourism to the island.

More:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/6182

~~~~~~~~
Wiki. RSF:

~snip~
Funding
Some funding (19% of total) comes from North American and European governments and organisations, among them the American National Endowment for Democracy (NED).<6><7> According to RWB president Robert Ménard, the donations from the French government account for 4,8% of RWB's budget; the total amount of governmental aid being 11% of its budget (including money from the French government, the OSCE, UNESCO and the Organisation internationale de la francophonie).<8> Furthermore RWB receives funding from various private donors, such as the Soros Foundation and the Center for a Free Cuba.<9> Furthermore, Saatchi & Saatchi has realized various communication campaigns of RWB for free (for instance, concerning censorship in Algeria <10>).

Both the NED and the Centre for a Free Cuba are funded by the US Government. However, Daniel Junqua, the vice-president of the French section of RWB (and also vice-president of the NGO Les Amis du Monde diplomatique), claims that the NED's funding does not compromise RWB's impartiality.<8>

RSF's Chinese website credits support from Taiwan Foundation for Democracy<11>, a quasi-government organization funded by the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs<12>.

On April 21, 2008 Le Figaro published an article on RSF's financing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders#Funding

~~~~~~~~~
~snip~
...Robert Menard, the self-styled "General Secretary" of the supposedly independent non-governmental group.

RSF is anything but unbiased however and receives its funding from a variety of government sources including the US State Department and Ronald Reagan's National Endowment for Democracy, whose officers read like a who's who of neoconservatism and include nearly all of the signers of the "Project for a new American Century." RSF has long been a font of anti-China news stories of dubious credibility.

RSF was banned by the United Nations in 2003 and kept away from its sessions on "human rights" because of its political activities. An imporitant financial contributer of RSF is TECRO, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which has its own agenda with Beijing.

http://sinomania.blogspot.com/rss.xml

~~~~~~~~~
Funding Sources
Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF's budget was primarily provided by "US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy" (Thibodeau, La Presse).

NED (US$39,900 paid 14 Jan 2005)
Center for a Free Cuba (USAID and NED funded) $50,000 per year NED grant. Contract was signed by Otto Reich
European Union (1.2m Euro) -- currently contested in EU parliament
Rights & Democracy in 2004 supported Reporters Without Borders-Canada <1>
"Grants from private foundations (Open Society Foundation, Center for a Free Cuba, Fondation de France, National Endowment for Democracy) were slightly up, due to the Africa project funded by the NED and payment by Center for a Free Cuba for a reprint of the banned magazine De Cuba." <2>

Principal focus of RSF activities
Cuba
Venezuela
Haiti

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders

~~~~~~~~~~
The Guild Reporter
Top Stories March 11, 2005

Government funds color press group�s objectivity
By Diana Barahona, Northern California Media Guild

Over the past year, U.S. news stories about press freedom increasingly have cited the work of a Paris-based organization, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, or RSF). Indeed, despite its small size and lack of high-profile principals, Reporters Without Borders has achieved nearly the same name-recognition as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which can boast of having Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw on its board of directors.

To be sure, RSF has embraced many causes near and dear to American journalists. For example, it was among the more outspoken organizations demanding a Pentagon investigation of the shelling of the Hotel Palestine, in which two journalists were inexplicably killed. More recently, it has lambasted federal prosecutors for targeting Judith Miller, Matthew Cooper and other journalists in an effort to force them to disclose their sources.

But RSF, unlike the CPJ, is heavily funded by government grants, raising questions about its objectivity. And a closer examination of the battles RSF wages—and those it ignores—strongly suggests a political agenda colored by its choice of patrons. Unfortunately, the organization appears unwilling to address such concerns: RSF’s New York representative, Tala Dowlatshahi, terminated a telephone interview when asked if the organization had applied last year for any U.S. government grants other than one received from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Most notable, perhaps, is the group’s obvious political bias in its reporting on Haiti. RSF expressed its support for the Feb. 29, 2004, Franco-American overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the same time that it received 11% of its budget from the French government (¤397,604, or approximately $465,200 in 2003). According to Haiti-based journalist and documentary film-maker Kevin Pina, the organization selectively documented attacks on opposition radio stations while ignoring other attacks on journalists and broadcasters to create the impression of state-sponsored violence against Aristide’s opponents.

More:
http://www.newsguild.org/gr/index.php?ID=2213

[Zorro]

13. So are you denying the reported FACTS?

More FUD from Judi. Not surprising.

So let's make a list of respected organizations you've accused of bias on the subject of Cuba:

Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
Reporters sans Frontieres

That's quite a list.

So again I ask the question. Are you denying the reported FACTS in the RSF report?

Well, maybe they aren't actually in prison -- but hiding out in Disneyland, right?

[roody]

6. DU meetup in Cuba.

Sorry to be redundant. I have August open.

[Zorro]

9. You're wasting your time

All the Fidelistas that incessantly post on DU are much too chicken to actually go to Cuba.

It might shatter their grand illusions.

[Mika]

14. And your vast experience in Cuba is...?

I've been there many times. I've lived there. I married a Cuban - in Cuba.

BTW, I'm not a Fidelista. I have consistently pointed out that Castro doesn't do all of the bad nor the good works that go on in Cuba. The Cuban people do. I've worked with them.

By continually mewling on about Castro this and Castro that relating to anything about Cuba you are demeaning and devaluing the Cuban people and the incredible work that they do. IMO, continually ignoring the fact that Cuba is managed by the Cuban people and by claiming that anything good and/or bad that occurs in Cuba is Fidel's doing makes you a bigot towards the good, decent, and hard working Cuban people. Either that, or you reveal your ignorance about Cuba and Cubans in Cuba with your age old, tired, and worn out rhetoric/bullshit.


Now, on to your vast experience in Cuba ...



-

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[Zorro]

15. So it's the good people of Cuba

that bear the responsibility for the political repression in the country?

Whatever you say, comrade.

If that's the kind of government the Cuban people want, then more power to them.

They truly deserve the kind of government and society that they desire.

[Mika]

16. You would know. After all, you have vast experience* in Cuba, and have done extensive research too.

* - none

- -

Please, inform us as to how you know so much about the place(?) - other than links to "reports" that come 2nd, 3rd, & 4th hand to AI, HRW, & RsF (because none are there).

Its of interest to me because your accounts of Cuba bear no resemblance to the Cuba I've been to, and lived. I keep in constant contact with many friends (both personal and professional) and family who live there.

-

How do you stay so up to date and informed on the goings on there? :rofl:

[Zorro]

17. It doesn't take a genius

to understand AI, HRW, and RsF aren't there BECAUSE THE CUBAN GOVERNMENT IS POLITICALLY REPRESSIVE. And it's you that indicated that government policies are controlled by the Cuban people.

So you're obviously either a Fidel pimp, or extra clueless. Probably both.

So go ahead and continue yammering on and on in this thread about the worker's paradise that is Cuba today; after all, unfettered internet access is something you don't have while you're there visiting your comrades, is it?

BWAHAHAHHAHA!!!!!!

[Mika]

18. OK. You agree. They don't do any first hand reports. Only hearsay from paid anti Castro opertatives

Like you, they use undocumented hearsay. "Some people say".

And I assume that you don't know where their funding comes from, do you? Try finding out for yourself. (Hint: Richard Mellon Scaife)

- -

I have always said that all things in Cuba aren't Fidel's doing, so how am I pimping for Fidel? :crazy: You are making even less sense.

- -

Posted by Zorro --->BWAHAHAHHAHA!!!!!!

How old are you? Maybe when you grow up you'll actually be able to discuss topics rationally.


-

[Zorro]

19. Just like North Korea

Yeah, Cuba's got a lot in common with that other free and open Asian society.

You gonna tell me how wonderful North Korean society is, also?

Oh, and I'm no doubt older than you, comrade.

And obviously much wiser.