Related: Obama Cuts Deal With Cuba
He might be rebuffed in his efforts so don't plan the trip just yet.
"Nation’s shift on Cuba reveals generation gap" by Noah Bierman, Globe Staff December 19, 2014
WASHINGTON — The United States Agency for International Development disburses $20 million a year to contractors, including some who have been shown in recent Associated Press investigations to spend money on trying to infiltrate the island’s hip-hop community and setting up social media services to undermine the regime.
That's your tax buck during these times of social service austerity and domestic neglect by this government, folks.
Btw, AID = CIA, and what you just saw was a coup attempt that failed and was then outed.
At least the agreement will put an end to this waste of money, right? Right?
More than 100 people work for Radio and TV Marti, an official US broadcast with a $26 million budget that reaches a small audience on the island.
Yes, U.S. taxpayers, you forked that over to broadcast propaganda, that's all. Hope it was well spent as you wallow in poverty (I'm right there with you) while the wealth up top parties on.
Btw, the reason the audiences are small is because the Cubans jam and scramble most of the broadcasts.
“There’s a lot of money involved,” said Jorge Dominguez, a Harvard University government professor who has written or edited several books on Cuba.
That's when nothing changes.
Those who favor a harder line resent the implication that politics or money are in play.
I notice people never do like the truth.
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Polling suggests politics may lag behind any changes in public opinion....
They always do!
Several prominent Florida politicians, including former governor Jeb Bush, a Republican who is exploring a run for president, criticized Obama’s deal to normalize relations. In a speech several weeks ago, he said the embargo should be strengthened, to increase pressure on Raul Castro’s regime to hold free elections, open its economy, and release political prisoners. New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat and Cuban American, also denounced the deal.
Won't that hurt his bid for president, and what's this about a off-shore private equity fund?
US Representative Joe Garcia, a Miami Democrat who favors closer ties with Cuba, said the old guard also holds the emotional advantage in the debate. He said they “built a shrine around a policy that was not particularly effective.”
Seems to be SOP for the US government in everything they do these days.
“That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t effective for politics,” Garcia added. Garcia lost his election in November after serving a single term.
Republicans are also coming under pressure from some of their most influential constituents to end the embargo, including the Chamber of Commerce, agri-business groups, and a variety of companies that want to trade with Havana.
Now you know why it is coming to an end, among other rea$ons.
Of course, some re$ent that.
Several Republican lawmakers have taken trips to Cuba in recent years, including Senator Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who was on the plane Wednesday with Alan Gross, the American who was freed by Cuba.
For some reason the Globe scrubbed Reiser's role and removed it from existence (to a certain degree? I'm a subscriber but I can't acce$$?). It was his deep depression as he was starting to lash out at his own government for abandoning him that caught my attention, so much so that he might kill himself.
"Not everyone agrees that the news out of Cuba this week was good — just ask Senator Marco Rubio — but President Obama’s decision to normalize relations with the island nation is indubitably good news for Representative James McGovern. The Worcester Democrat has long advocated for an end to the Cold War enmity and for the release of Alan Gross, an aid worker who was freed from a Cuban prison Wednesday. And who was waiting for him on the tarmac outside Washington? Jim McGovern."
He's my slavish (and unopposed) pos rep in Congress, and I believe he voted for war with Russia.
And note how all this Cuba talk surrounding Gross has vanquished further reporting on U.S. torture. The mind-molding, ma$$ media machine has many layers of manipulation at its disposal.
Many businesses are eager to open in Havana. Stephen Joyce, chief executive of Choice Hotels Inc., said that if Congress lifts the trade embargo, hotel chains and cruise ships will begin investing almost immediately, because the country is 90 miles from the United States and has miles of beaches and an intriguing history.
The history being what, it being a Mob paradise under Bautista?
“We have been at a huge disadvantage because European competitors have been able to go there and we have not,” Joyce said in an interview. “I’ve been interested for 20 years, waiting for an opportunity.”
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Nice to $ee U.S. altrui$m at work.
And that unnamed prisoner that was released has now been named:
"CIA mole, now out of prison, helped US identify Cuban spies" by Mark Mazzetti and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times December 19, 2014
WASHINGTON — He was, in many ways, a perfect spy — a man so important to Cuba’s intelligence apparatus that the information he gave to the CIA paid dividends long after Cuban authorities arrested him and threw him in prison for nearly two decades.
Rolando Sarraff Trujillo has now been released from prison and flown out of Cuba as part of a swap for three Cuban spies imprisoned in the United States that President Obama announced Wednesday in a televised speech. Obama did not give Sarraff’s name, but several current US officials identified him and a former official discussed some of the information he gave to the CIA while burrowed deep inside Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence.
Sarraff’s story is a chapter in a drama between the United States and Cuba that played on long after the end of the Cold War, decades after Cuba ceased to be a serious threat to the United States.
It never was a threat.
The story — at this point — remains just a sketchy outline, with Sarraff hidden from public view and his work for the CIA classified.
A polite way of saying I am getting public relations propaganda and CIA reputation repair in light of the Senate torture report.
Chris Simmons, who was the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit for the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1996 to 2004, said that Sarraff had worked in the cryptology section of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence and was a specialist on the codes used by Cuban spies in the United States to communicate with Havana. Sarraff’s family said that he studied journalism at the University of Havana and had the rank of first lieutenant at the intelligence directorate.
It is not clear when Sarraff, now 51, began working for the CIA.
Yes it is. We are not being told.
But, according to Simmons, once he did he passed encryption information to the CIA that led to the arrest of a number of Cuban agents operating in the United States.
In his speech Wednesday, Obama referred to Sarraff as “one of the most important intelligence agents that the United States has ever had in Cuba,” someone who “provided America with the information that allowed us to arrest the network of Cuban agents that included the men transferred to Cuba today, as well as other spies in the United States.”
The convictions included a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency named Ana Belén Montes; a former Department of State official, Walter Kendall Myers, and his wife, Gwendolyn; and members of the Red Avispa network, or Wasp Network, in Florida.
Jerry Komisar, who ran CIA clandestine operations in Cuba during the 1990s, said that “there were a number of people in the Cuban government who were valuable to the US, just as there were a number of people in the US government who were helpful to the Cubans.”
Simmons said that Cuba’s spy service regularly communicated with its agents in America using encrypted messages sent over shortwave radio. After Sarraff helped the United States crack the codes, he said, the FBI was able to arrest Cuban spies years after Sarraff was put in prison in Cuba.
“When Roly was providing information, he was giving us insights about where there were weaknesses in the Cuban encryption system,” Simmons said.
And now the NSA collects everything.
Cuban authorities arrested Sarraff in November 1995. According to members of his family, he went to work one day and never came home. According to Simmons, “had it not been for his parents being senior officials in the Cuban government, they would have executed him.”
He was tried in 1996 for espionage, revealing state secrets and other acts against state security. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“He is always maintained his innocence” his sister, Vilma, said by telephone from Spain.
She said Sarraff’s daughter was 7 years old when he was arrested. His whereabouts are still unknown, she said.
With the exchange of imprisoned spies and the leaders of the United States and Cuba talking in a substantive way for the first time in more than 50 years, some people who were part of the spy games between the two countries now wonder just how much it was worth it.
Komisar, the former CIA officer, said that in retrospect there was little need for US intelligence services to devote so much attention to Cuba.
I'm hoping the wasted loot as this country faces out-of-control bankruptcy was worth it -- all to serve certain political intere$ts.
He said it was a country with a decrepit military that he said posed no strategic threat to the United States since the Soviet Union pulled its missiles off the island in 1962.
Like I said above, and at that time we had a skillful and -- I hate to say it, but it's true in retrospect -- a saintly man in the office of president, a decent, caring, compassionate, human man who.... who.... aaaaaah, I can't even get throughout it because....
Sort of throws all that rhetoric coming out all those decades since regarding Cuba fomenting revolution everywhere a bunch of bull crap, too.
Was there NOTHING my GOVERNMENT or MEDIA told me that was NOT a LIE?
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"Can Cuba escape poverty but stay healthy?" by Margot Sanger-Katz, New York Times December 19, 2014
NEW YORK — Cuba has many economic problems, including the inefficiencies of central planning and the long trade embargo with the United States. Yet the country has a thriving public health system that has made its population among the healthiest in the world.
What?
Researchers call it the Cuban Health Paradox. The country’s economic isolation has left it poor, but people there live as long as their counterparts in much richer countries, according to data from the World Bank.
Can we get that health $y$tem instead of Obummercare?
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Cuba stands out. For the size of its economy, Cuba does a remarkable job of keeping its children healthy.
“I am often asked why is this poor country so healthy, but you also have to ask why is this healthy country so poor?” said Jerry Spiegel, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Population and Public Health. Spiegel has studied the Cuban health system for more than 15 years.
Many important drugs are either unavailable in Cuba or so expensive that they are impractical. Specialized medical care is limited. Even basic supplies, such as the chlorine used as a disinfectant, can be hard to come by. There was a time when anesthesia was so scarce that surgeons used acupuncture to control patients’ pain during operations.
But the country has invested heavily in primary care and public health measures. It has an unusually high number of doctors, and the government uses central planning to ensure that they are spread evenly across the country. The bulk of health care is government-financed, which means that nearly every Cuban has equal access to the same health system. The country has one of the highest childhood vaccination rates in the world. And Cuba has for decades sent doctors to help with health crises around the world, including the current Ebola outbreak in Africa.
It's something that has never really made the AmeriKan pre$$ much even as the in$urers and government claim to do the same for us.
The Communist government has focused efforts on ensuring access to public education, housing, and nutrition — investments that health researchers say can be as important to health as medicine and doctors. Spiegel said he had observed an unusual coordination of government functions related to health.
Too bad it's for wars here in AmeriKa.
When the country was experiencing an outbreak of dengue fever in the 1990s, he said, public officials treated and isolated patients but also cleaned up the places where mosquitoes that spread the disease were breeding.
Gotta be careful when you are traveling around Cuba.
The result: Cuba’s citizens are much more likely to die from the maladies that kill rich people — cancer and heart disease — than the communicable diseases that kill in most poor places.
Researchers like to study the Cuban system because it might hold lessons about how to keep a country healthy.
Oh, COME ON! I've been saying that FOR YEARS and have been IGNORED!
Historically, the health of a country’s population has been correlated with its overall wealth. But in recent history, that tight relationship has started to break down.
No wonder the American people are so sick.
Cuba’s health care system might benefit from its relative isolation. In many countries with economies the size of Cuba’s, doctors and other medical professionals leave to work in the United States. Cuba has suffered no such brain drain.
Yeah, thank you AmeriKan embargo.
Spiegel said the country’s economic isolation might have other advantages, too: The country has become much more self-reliant, he said, and has invested in its own biomedical research.
They have money to invest?
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