So Castro has retired

CNN just told me that Cuba is a state sponsor of terror.

darkcrow wrote:

Did not see a thread so I thought I would start one.
Thought it was quite ironic Bush was calling for a democratic Cuba.... i guess he has forgotten about all those easily hackable voting machines, voter irregularities, the purging of voter registration rolls etc etc etc

i so wanted to read that he had "died" i hope he does soon ....

SBC03 wrote:

ignorance is bliss.

there is not one person in Cuba who has a say in anything that they do. They cant take a shit in hotel if they needed to. (look up the civil rights movement here in the states)

They are told where to live, what to do for a living, and how much to eat for a month.

They steal from the gov't to trade for necessities (soap, toilet paper, tampons)

The embargo should lifted, then the dictatorship will not have anyone to blame for the problems but themselves. FYI Cuba bought over $400 mil in 2007 alone from the US. Mainlly from farmers in Nebraska, Iowa and Texas.
Oh and if your visiting you can buy windex, carona, hineken, sony, sharp etc. etc with the euro or the dollar. But you must be tourist. so the embargo my ass.

Miami terrorists? give me a fuckin break. Who do they terrorize? The cuban people, is that why they risk their lives to cross shark infested waters or if they're lucky, have family members pay 3gs a head to be smuggled.

And for all this shit there are flights on Continental and American to Cuba.

Che and Castro are mudering fucks just like Pinochet, Mussalini, Hitler, Stalin

FYI - Cuba had the color tv and the fridge before the US

Did the United States tell you this?

Nevermind wrote:

Did the United States tell you this?

No, I have 2 brothers that work with me that have defected. One came 10 yrs ago and the other 9.06. Thay have another brother who "won" his visa and came in Dec. They still have a sister there, but she hasnt "won" her visa yet. So, from first hand info I kind get an idea of what is happening. Also remember, those who live in Havana can "get more" things as opposed to someone who lives outside of the city.

If you want me to be more specific or have any questions let me know, more than happy to enlighten.

SBC03 wrote:

No, I have 2 brothers that work with me that have defected. One came 10 yrs ago and the other 9.06. Thay have another brother who "won" his visa and came in Dec. They still have a sister there, but she hasnt "won" her visa yet. So, from first hand info I kind get an idea of what is happening. Also remember, those who live in Havana can "get more" things as opposed to someone who lives outside of the city.

If you want me to be more specific or have any questions let me know, more than happy to enlighten.

Dont have any questions. Ive been to Cuba.

this is in this weeks newsweek

http://www.newsweek.com/id/114720

The phone woke Yoani Sanchez long before dawn in her 12th-floor Havana apartment. It was a French TV network calling to get her reaction to the Cuban government's announcement: Fidel Castro was finally resigning as president. Half asleep and utterly stunned by the news, Sánchez could hardly think what to say.

That had to be a strange sensation. The 32-year-old Sánchez's fearlessly critical blog, Generación Y, has won rapt attention from Cuba watchers in recent months, making her an unofficial spokesperson for the island's young people. While the party newspaper, Granma, devotes its front page to ponderous "reflections" by the ailing, 81-year-old Castro on climate change, Sánchez writes stinging accounts of daily ordeals in Cuba—like the food shortages at her 12-year-old son's school, or the obstacles facing a young couple who want a place of their own instead of a room with their parents. Sánchez doesn't hide her disdain for Castro and his brother, Raúl, 76, who has sat in as president since Fidel fell ill in the summer of 2006. "They're washed up," she told NEWSWEEK last week. "With each passing day they have less and less time to fulfill their promises."

Most Cubans have been waiting all their lives for those promises to be met. Although the lot of some older Cubans may have been improved by the revolution that toppled dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959, an estimated 70 percent of Cuba's 11.3 million people weren't even born then. Younger Cubans now mostly identify "Fidelismo" with hardship, especially those who, like Sánchez, came of age during the 1990s. That was the island's "Special Period"—an era of extreme belt-tightening after Castro's aid pipeline dried up with the collapse of the Soviet Union. (The nickname Generación Y derives from a Cuban fad in the '70s and '80s for baby names beginning with that letter.) "Unlike our parents, we never believed in anything," says Sánchez. "Our defining characteristic is cynicism. But that's a double-edged sword. It protects you from crushing disappointment, but it paralyzes you from doing anything."

Raised on a relentless diet of antiimperialist harangues and exhortations to ever-greater sacrifice, millions of young Cubans want the regime to cut the rhetoric and make tangible improvements in their lives. Many have given up hope: from October 2005 through September 2007, an estimated 77,000 Cubans fled to the United States, the biggest exodus since the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when 125,000 Cubans escaped to Florida in six months. "Young people are very fed up with the situation," says Julia Núñez Pacheco, the wife of jailed independent journalist Adolfo Fernández Sainz. "Many are escaping, either by hurling themselves into the sea on a raft or arranging a marriage of convenience with foreigners." The couple's 32-year-old daughter, Joana, left Cuba to join her husband in Miami last year.

Most young Cubans' aspirations are decidedly apolitical. Forget about democracy or free speech; the serious focus is on things taken for granted by youngsters elsewhere: freedom to travel abroad, unrestricted access to the Internet, enough disposable income to buy a mobile phone or an iPod—even the simple right to walk into a five-star hotel in their own country and buy a beer. "These young students are asking, 'Why are things banned? Why are we not allowed to leave the island?'" says Miriam Leiva, a prominent dissident leader who once held a high-level post in the Cuban Foreign Ministry. "They look around at other young people grouped on the corner playing dominoes out of boredom, and they want something different."

Raúl Castro has only himself to blame for their undisguised impatience. Within weeks of stepping in for his bedridden older brother, he urged Cubans to blow the whistle on government corruption and to find new solutions for the country's many problems. Cuba's young could hardly have agreed more: sweeping changes were overdue. And what happened next? Nothing. In a major speech last summer, after nearly a year in charge, the younger Castro acknowledged failures that were painfully self-evident: salaries were too low, food production and distribution were dysfunctional and the system remained as full as ever of unaddressed problems.

Watch the documentary "Fidel - the untold story"

It will show you a side of reality the US media has repressed extensively to suit their private agenda.

farfromglorified wrote:

Without sweeping change within Cuba, lifting the embargo will do little other than further enrich the existing Cuban elite. The embargo absolutely should be lifted, but internal change within Cuba is much more important. Having "over 20,000 trained medical doctors" is meaningless when they are forced by the government to operate in Venezuela and other places for political reasons. Cuba does not "have the right idea" anymore than Southern plantation owners or Soviet bureaucrats had the right idea. They have no idea, which is largely why their country is a mess.

All countries seem to have their share of wrong ideas and messes. It's all subjective as to who has the most mess.

Abookamongstthemany wrote:

All countries seem to have their share of wrong ideas and messes.

Absolutely! But this does not make them all equally bad.

It's all subjective as to who has the most mess.

Again, absolutely. But there's a reason you don't see too many Americans building boats out of old cars and seeking asylum in Cuba.

SBC03 wrote:

ignorance is bliss.

there is not one person in Cuba who has a say in anything that they do. They cant take a shit in hotel if they needed to. (look up the civil rights movement here in the states)

They are told where to live, what to do for a living, and how much to eat for a month.

They steal from the gov't to trade for necessities (soap, toilet paper, tampons)

The embargo should lifted, then the dictatorship will not have anyone to blame for the problems but themselves. FYI Cuba bought over $400 mil in 2007 alone from the US. Mainlly from farmers in Nebraska, Iowa and Texas.
Oh and if your visiting you can buy windex, carona, hineken, sony, sharp etc. etc with the euro or the dollar. But you must be tourist. so the embargo my ass.

Miami terrorists? give me a fuckin break. Who do they terrorize? The cuban people, is that why they risk their lives to cross shark infested waters or if they're lucky, have family members pay 3gs a head to be smuggled.

And for all this shit there are flights on Continental and American to Cuba.

Che and Castro are mudering fucks just like Pinochet, Mussalini, Hitler, Stalin

FYI - Cuba had the color tv and the fridge before the US

Look up Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada Carriles, Jorge Mas Canosa, Gaspar Jiménez, Pedro Remón Rodríguez and Carlos Muñiz Varela. All of these men at one point in time have been linked to terrorist activity. All of these men are Cuban-American based in South Florida back by the CIA to undertake covert missions against the Castro regime. Some of their atrocities include the bombing of the Cubana Air flight 455 in 1976 that killed 73 people. The bombing of ocean side resorts in Cuba in 1997 that resulted in the death of an Italian tourist. The assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976. The list of bombings, assassinations, and attempted bombings and assassination goes on. All of them attributed to one or all of these men and their associated. All carried out in the name of freeing Cuba and many carried out while these men where in the employ of the CIA.

Some of these men along with Guillermo Novo Sampoll where the founder of Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) which the FBI had classified as a terrorist organization. So in short our government has ,since Castro first took office, been the instigator and proven itself a far greater threat to Cuba than Cuba ever posed to us.

So next time before you spout off about things you know nothing about educate yourself on the topic a bit more.