I get your point, well said. You do have to get over here. But, my point is that people are being turned away when they get here.
That is a fact.
Like I said, I have family working for Immigration and they tell me this is what happens.
I'm sure tons of people get turned away. Many people probably apply who aren't really being persecuted. (Whatever that might mean to you or me probably isn't exactly what it means to the gov't)
But I don't get you hating the Cuban people just because they aren't treated by the government that same as Mexicans. You should hate our gov't (if you disagree so much), not the Cuban people.
You're right about that.
I'm just being petty.
But, I do hate the way our government treats others, such as Mexicans.
BREAKING NEWS: Fidel Castro won't return to presidency
Great News!!! Castro!
My grandfather fled Cuba with his 7 year old daughter (my Mother) so that she could grow up with the opportunities and freedoms we have here in this great country. My Grandmother wasn't allowed to come over to the States for another 12 years.
i hate the cubans too, but only cause every time I'm in south florida a cuban taxi driver scares me to death with his highway driving skills.
They are worse then Mexican cab drivers in Mexico.........which I had previously thought was impossible.
stereo-typing complete.
And then you became a Chiefs fan?
Go back to Cuba!!! Go Broncos.
Kidding.
I agree with the Castro sentiment. timvp lost a lot of family, including his grandpa because of Castro.
Sad to hear that.I agree with the Castro sentiment. timvp lost a lot of family, including his grandpa because of Castro.
What sickens me more is hearing Ed Asner saying "I wish our country was more like a Castro led Cuba"
Very sad. My Mother had an uncle who was taken away, imprisoned and later died in jail for speaking and acting out against Castro publicly. Supposedly, I still have quite a bit of family in Cuba, which I'll probably never get to meet.I agree with the Castro sentiment. timvp lost a lot of family, including his grandpa because of Castro.
Oh, so America can once again send its corporations in and exploit the Cuban people just like before.
Boutons, when did you change your name? I didn't get the memo.
Besides, the Cuban folks are already used to being opressed, so it's not like they'll notice any difference.
First business in order to help them is to take that pesky embargo that the Americans placed on Cuba that did nothing but hurt the Cuban citizens.
yeah, screw you America.
This is probably Dubya's fault.
That's why you disapproved of my "I hate Cubans" comment.I agree with the Castro sentiment. timvp lost a lot of family, including his grandpa because of Castro.
timvp and his family aren't Cuban. They are Dominican.
Why would that happen? Cuba has strong support from Venezuela, China, Iran and Russia; we don't have anything they need. Except for maybe a few tourist dollars---which will pale in comparison with what Europeans and Asians already spend there every year. There will be no big change until after Raul Castro is also gone--if then.
What did Castro do to the Dominicans?
Wasn't Trujillo the one that ed up La Dominica?
timvp can explain the story better. But Castro pretended to help the Dominican revolutionaries in their fight against Trujillo and then he turned around and double crossed them, leading them straight into a trap and their deaths. timvp lost his grandpa and all his uncles on his mom's side directly because of it
That explains it.timvp can explain the story better. But Castro pretended to help the Dominican revolutionaries in their fight against Trujillo and then he turned around and double crossed them, leading them straight into a trap and their deaths. timvp lost his grandpa and all his uncles on his mom's side directly because of it
I'd like to learn a little more about that.
As soon as they show they are willing to help their own people out as well, I'm sure that embargo will be lifted.
Which is it, "help them out" or make them show that "they are willing to help their own people out"?
You can't have it both ways.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localne...ostcastro.html
Perspective: A detailed look at Castro's rise, decades in power
By Michael Browning
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Fidel Castro Ruz, Cuba's "maximum leader," el jefe, president, former prime minister, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party and commander in chief of Cuba's armed forces, resigned as Cuba's president Tuesday at the age of 81.
Castro's influence has been immense, all out of proportion to the 44,218-square-mile island nation he controlled. He pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 during the so-called Cuban Missile Crisis. He did more to change Florida than even the early conquistadors, for his revolution touched off waves of emigration from Cuba to the United States that transformed the state. Florida is now 15 percent Hispanic.
Like a skillful matador baiting a maddened bull, he was able to tease, provoke, infuriate and blind his giant neighbor 90 miles to the north for over 40 years, adroitly employing a U.S. trade embargo to his own advantage, as proof of American bullying and as a boost to Cuban revolutionary pride and independence.
Anti-capitalist to the end, Castro bitterly denied a 2006 report in Forbes magazine asserting that he was worth $900 million, based on his control of state-owned companies.
"If they can prove that I have a bank account abroad, with $900 million, with $1 million, $500,000, $100,000 or $1 in it, I will resign," he said on state-owned television.
Castro's cult of personality
The 6-foot-tall Castro stupefied audiences of the party faithful with five- and six-hour speeches whose constant theme was "Socialism or Death." He imprisoned opponents, smothered dissent and executed an estimated 5,000 people during his 47 years in power. He ruled over a once-bountiful, still-beautiful island of 11 million people, known as "The Pearl of the Antilles," using a system of spies, repression and shortages.
By the end of Castro's reign, Cubans had regressed to the 19th century. They were getting around on bicycles, or on foot, plowing their fields with oxen, using horses to pull wagons, living on ration tickets and hoarding slivers of soap. Too poor to buy their own fragrant cigars, they exported them for foreign currency.
They exported their own people, too. In massive waves of emigration, repeated at intervals over 40 years, hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled Castro's rule in boats, inner-tubes, makeshift rafts, even on windsurfer boards, carrying crucifixes and valueless pesos, hoping for rescue and a renewed chance at life and prosperity.
"I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, in the 1960s, near the beach," remembered Larry Rohter, a correspondent for The New York Times. "When I'd run out to play on the beach in the morning, I'd see dead people washed up with inner tubes around them. It impressed me, that they were willing to die to get away from Cuba."
When dissatisfaction with his regime threatened to boil over in 1980, Castro simply swept the dissatisfied across the Florida Straits to the United States in the gigantic Mariel boatlift.
Some 125,000 Cuban refugees fled the island to the U.S. in a few frantic weeks. Castro shrewdly cleaned out his prisons, too, and flung common criminals aboard the Mariel flotilla. Miami saw a record 600-plus murders that year as a result, and screen director Brian DiPalma immortalized the chaos in a remake of the movie "Scarface."
A legacy of longevity
In the end, Castro endured. He ruled Cuba longer than Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, longer than Mao Zedong ruled China. Until he resigned, predictions of his downfall and death were as frequent as they were false.
He would not survive the U.S. trade embargo, it was said. He survived it. Cuba would rise up spontaneously, it was thought, to greet the Bay of Pigs invasion. It didn't rise up. Castro would be toppled from power, it was certain, once Soviet support was withdrawn. He didn't topple.
He thrived on the curses of his enemies, drawing strength from their anger and frustration. A case could be made that Castro was kept in power by the very people who hated him the most: the Cuban exile community. Their ironclad insistence on a futile trade embargo only served to cocoon Cuba from the breezes of the outside world. The embargo locked the country inside a communist time-vault, where the clock stopped in 1959. It gave Castro an all-too-easy explanation for all the economic miseries his misrule occasioned.
He called the exiles "gusanos," worms. What they called him cannot be printed. Castro, ironically, helped bankrupt and break up the Soviet Union. Under Castro, Cuba became a gigantic white elephant on the hands of the U.S.S.R., which by 1980 was pouring $3 million a day into the island to prop up its costly ally.
In the end, staring down superpowers, outlasting opponents at home and abroad, the wily dictator cut a wide wake across the world and goes to his grave with a certain undeniable style and swagger. He was one man, ruling over one relatively small island, but he managed to sway millions, scare the planet and shape modern history.
A privileged upbringing
Castro was born on Aug. 13, 1926, on a farm in Mayari municipality in the province of Oriente. His father, Angel Castro y Argiz, made a fortune selling horses to the Spanish colonial army of Gen. Espanol Weyler during the Cuban revolution of 1895 and ran a large, prosperous 1,000-acre ranch named Mana Acas ("Remain here").
Castro's mother was Lina Ruz Gonzalez, daughter of a second-generation Jewish immigrant family from Edirne, Turkey. Her father was Angel Castro's business partner. With her, Angel Castro had seven children: Fidel, Raul, Emma, Juana, Angela, Agustina and Ramon. Raul Castro became vice president of Cuba, while Juana defected to Miami, ran a drugstore in Little Havana and openly criticized her brother, the dictator.
Castro received an excellent education at the strict Jesuit boarding school in Havana, the Colegio de Belen; but he rebelled against the discipline and the strict orthodoxy of Catholicism and soon renounced religion. As a teenager, he liked baseball and once wrote a fan letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking for his autograph and a $5 bill. Roosevelt did not reply.
In 1945, he enrolled at the University of Havana, graduating in 1950 with a law degree. He married Mirta Diaz-Balart in 1948, but they were divorced in 1954. Their son, Fidel Castro Diaz-Balart, born in 1949, once served as head of Cuba's atomic energy commission. Castro also had an illegitimate daughter, Alina, by socialite Natalia Revuelta, and five sons by Dalia Soto del Valle.
Castro gravitated early toward politics. He became a member of the social-democratic Ortodoxo party in the late 1940s and through the 1950s vocally opposed the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, an army sergeant who had seized power in 1933, was briefly deposed and led a second coup in 1952. U.S. rule of Cuba had ended in 1909, but American troops were dispatched to the island several times in the decades that followed, and Cuba was heavily dependent on U.S. economic investment.
On July 26, 1953, Castro led an attack on the Moncada army barracks that failed but brought him national prominence. For his role in the failed attack, Castro was tried and sentenced to 15 years in prison. "History will vindicate me," he told the court. Pardoned in 1955, Castro went into exile in Mexico, where he founded the 26th of July Movement (named after the date of the Moncada assault), vowing to overthrow Batista. He returned in December 1956, accompanied by 81 comrades, including Ernesto "Che" Guevara, an Argentine physician.
The band of barbudos, or bearded ones, hid out in the Sierra Maestra mountains, from which they launched a successful guerrilla war that was thrillngly described by New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews.
Castro became a kind of Cuban Robin Hood and won popular support for his cause both among the Cuban poor and middle classes, as well as in the United States. Cuba under Batista had become a sea-girt Sodom of rum, corruption, gambling and pros ution. Batista had padlocked Havana University to suppress student protests. The U.S. cut off arms sales to Cuba in 1958. Far from being a peasant's revolt, Castro's revolution had the fervent support of the best and brightest people in Cuba.
The overthrow
In the final weeks of 1958, Guevara routed 3,000 government troops in the province of Las Villas, 150 miles from the capital. A trainload of troops was sent to crush the rebellion; the troops refused to get off the railroad cars. Batista flew into exile on New Year's Day. When he landed at Jacksonville's Imeson airport, a Cuban exile rushed up to him and punched him in the face.
That night in Miami, the tiny Cuban community honked car horns and fired pistols in the air for joy. Soon, they would have plenty of company.
"There is corruption in every government. Batista took some money under the table from some people, sure," said Chris Oviedo, interviewed in 1999. "But Castro took away everything from everybody." Oviedo is a former jai-alai player who fled Cuba in 1960, rather than join Castro's militia. He found a job as a concierge at the Sun & Surf condominiums on Palm Beach.
"Power does not interest me. I will not take it," the 33-year-old Castro said at the end of a 600-mile triumphal march down Cuba's Central Highway. "From now on, the people are entirely free." He flew to Washington with a hundred cases of gift-rum, lunched in his fatigue jacket with Acting Secretary of State Christian Herter, talked to 18 congressmen on the Senate Foreign Relations committee and said his movement was "not a communist movement."
"We have no intention of expropriating United States property, and any property we take we'll pay for."
Within months of his return to Cuba, Castro suspended habeas corpus, established military tribunals all over the island, sent scores of Batista supporters to firing squads, recognized communist China and called the United States "a vulture . . . feeding on humanity." He spoke openly of his plans to communize Cuba within three years. The Pearl of the Antilles was vanishing behind what people called "the cane curtain."
One after another, U.S. assets worth $1 billion were nationalized. The U.S. responded with a trade embargo that remains in force to the present day. Washington severed diplomatic ties with Cuba in January 1961.
"I was working at the Remington typewriter plant in Havana," Jose Ruiz, an elderly West Palm Beach typewriter repairman, recalled. "One day, they walked in with a paper and we were all supposed to sign it. They were going to take over the plant. I refused to sign. I walked out and never came back. Eventually, I came to the United States."
Tens of thousands came with him. Parents who couldn't come sent their children alone, on mercy flights, to be taken care of as orphans by Catholic charities, in what was called Operation Pedro Pan. Much of Cuba's educated, upper and middle classes eventually came to South Florida, the nearest point to their former homeland, where they transformed Miami from a relaxed town of beaches and Art Deco hotels to a glass-towered hub of intercontinental commerce and banking. The city also developed a reputation for international intrigue and drug-smuggling.
Tensions with U.S. increase
John F. Kennedy had been president just one week when CIA Director Allen Dulles approached him with the news that a brigade of Cuban counter-revolutionaries had been secretly training in Guatemala for an armed invasion of Cuba. Dulles hoped for a repeat of the Eisenhower administration's 1954 coup in Guatemala, which overthrew a Marxist government there. Dulles assured Kennedy that at least 25 percent of the population of Cuba favored Castro's overthrow and, in the unlikely event the invasion failed, the landing force would "melt into the hills."
Kennedy yielded. The resultant Bay of Pigs invasion was a bloody disaster. A force of about 1,400 men disembarked on the night of April 17, 1961, across unmapped razor-sharp coral reefs that barred easy access to the beach. The volunteers had to slog ashore through deep surf that rendered many of their weapons inoperable.
Worse, the beach was far from deserted. The Bahia de Cochinos was being developed as a tourist resort, and within minutes of the landing, the Cuban militia was shooting back. Castro was alerted at 3:15 a.m. and sent 20,000 troops to the Bay of Pigs. At dawn, he launched six B-26 bombers and two T-33 jet trainer aircraft that flew rings around the invaders' lumbering aircraft. The U.S. declined to provide air support, and air mastery remained Castro's throughout the battle. Abandoned by their ships, ringed by heavy artillery and Soviet T-34 tanks, the exiles' invasion collapsed in 72 hours. Some 114 died.
"Paredon! Paredon!" Cubans screamed at the defeated exiles, referring to the wall against which condemned men faced the firing squad. After huge trials in Havana's stadium, the exiles were imprisoned and finally ransomed in 1962 for $53 million worth of food and medicine. Today, a monument to Brigade 2506 stands in Miami's Little Havana, as a memorial to the quixotic, yet undeniably brave attempt to liberate Cuba.
America's next brush with Castro nearly brought on World War III. U-2 spy plane overflights of western Cuba revealed a trapezoidal field near San Cristobal, protected by surface-to-air missiles and equipped with missile transporters, erectors and launchers. It was Oct. 15, 1962. The next 13 days proved to be terrifying, both at the time and in retrospect. Intelligence experts warned that, using the San Cristobal site, the Soviet Union would be able to launch an initial salvo of 40 nuclear warheads at the United States and that the weapons would reach their targets in as little as 2 minutes. As many as 80 million could die.
Initially the U.S. military, supported by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, favored a surgical air strike. But Defense Secretary Robert McNamara urged a more cautious response: A naval blockade of the island. Some 180 Navy ships were deployed in the Caribbean, B-52 bombers carrying atomic weapons stayed airborne 24 hours a day in shifts, and fighter jets screamed over Jacksonville, Homestead and Key West. The First Armored Division was moved from Texas to embarkation ports in Georgia. A quarter of a million U.S. troops were put on alert.
On Oct. 22, eight days after the missiles were detected in Cuba, President Kennedy went on national television at 7 p.m. and told the country "unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island." Aerial reconnaissance revealed feverish construction activity on at least eight bases, at least 30 missiles on Cuban soil and over 20 Ilyushin jet light bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons to the U.S.
On Oct. 24, some 20 Soviet ships bound for Cuba stopped dead in the water. Six, then 12, turned around. Secretary of State Dean Rusk nudged National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy and said: "We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked."
On Oct. 28, Radio Moscow announced: "The Soviet government . . . has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union." The U.S. promised in return not to invade Cuba.
Castro blustered that he had been betrayed and wasn't bound by the agreement, but the missiles were in Soviet hands and no Cubans knew how to operate them. The crisis ended, and the world stepped back from the brink of atomic war.
Cuba sinks deeper into poverty
The missile episode marked Castro's apogee on the world stage. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the dictator attempted to export his revolutionary ideals to South America and Africa, but Cuba itself sank deeper and deeper into poverty. Political dissent led to prison or deportation. Between 1965 and 1973, some 260,000 Cubans fled the island to the U.S.
Cuba was expelled from the Organization of American States in 1962, and the revolutionary icon "Che" Guevara was executed in Bolivia in 1967 while leading a futile insurrection. Che's handsome, long-haired picture adorned thousands of college dorm rooms in the U.S., where he posthumously became a radical chic hero during the Vietnam War. His mystique as the incorruptible Marxist lasted long enough for him to end up as a character in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1979 Broadway musical, "Evita."
In 1975, Castro sent Cuban ground troops to fight in a Marxist rebellion in Angola. Later, Cuban forces shored up the brutal regime of Ethiopian leader Col. Mengistu Haile-Mariam in his war against Somalia, and by 1980, Cubans were fighting in Southern Yemen. Perhaps his most significant goodwill gesture was the exporting of his doctors to Third World countries such as Haiti and to Central and South America.
But Castro was full of surprises. In 1980 came the Mariel boatlift, a chaotic exodus of about 125,000 people from the beleaguered island. Cuban Americans sailed across the Straits of Florida and picked up their compatriots in an astounding mass-rescue that resembled the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II. As Jimmy Carter's administration fumbled to respond, a population equivalent to that of a mid-sized city plopped down in Miami almost overnight.
The refugees were housed in tent cities under I-95, at the Krome Detention Camp in far western Dade County, in refugee settlements on Tamiami Trail. Crime soared. Castro had mixed common criminals with the flood of refugees, emptying his jails. Ultimately 2,700 Cuban felons were returned to the island, after being housed in federal detention centers from Atlanta to Lompoc, Calif.
Castro's attempt to support a Marxist revolution on the island of Grenada was squelched by a U.S. invasion in 1983. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev visited Cuba in April 1989 and signed a 25-year friendship treaty with Castro, but Castro specifically rejected any Soviet-style reform. By 1993, the last Soviet troops were withdrawn from the island.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Castro lost his main economic prop. Trade with the Soviet Union had amounted to $5 billion a year. In three short years, Cuba's total foreign income shrank from $8.1 billion in 1989 to $2.2 billion in 1992. A chicken cost a month's salary, 120 pesos. Government workers earned the equivalent of $3 a month. Sugarcane production dropped to a 30-year low in 1994. The island was an economic basket case.
Tourists welcomed
Castro's solution was to permit limited tourism in Cuba, at specially designated resorts where only dollars were accepted as currency. Doctors and schoolteachers began moonlighting as taxi drivers and pros utes.
In an odd way, Cuba's sheer backwardness made it an attractive tourist destination. Crumbling palaces and puttering old DeSoto and Studebaker automobiles offered a glimpse of life 40 years ago. The lack of industry and development had left Cuba's beaches and coral reefs in wonderfully pristine condition.
Sheer economic desperation forced yet another wave of emigration in 1994, as thousands of balseros, or raft people, attempted to reach the U.S. on miserable home-made craft that frequently broke apart at sea, drowning their passengers. Caked with salt, dripping with brine, sunburnt and starving, some 30,000 Cuban refugees came ashore in the Florida Keys before the U.S. finally slammed the door shut, announcing that Cubans would no longer be granted automatic asylum upon arrival in the U.S. Those who persisted in coming were repatriated forcibly through the U.S. naval base in Cuba at Guantanamo.
Bettye Chaplin, a real estate agent in Marathon, saw a daylight ghost in those days. A young windsurfer skidded up into her yard in 1996, after completing one of the strangest voyages on record across the Florida Straits.
"His hair was all y with salt and his feet were dead-white from standing on the board so long. And he just kind of collapsed," Chaplin said.
"I said to him: 'Are you telling me you've come from Cuba?' And he said: 'S".'
"And I said: 'Where's your boat?' And he pointed to this thing, this board, and I asked him: 'You came all the way from Cuba on that?' And he said: 'S".'
"And I said to my husband: 'Jimmy, call 911! This kid has come from Cuba, Jimmy!' And we took him out into the yard and put him under the sprinkler. His skin was on fire. And we gave him a glass of water and some bran cookies - my husband and I were on a diet and we had no food in the house at all. And he said: 'Gracias.'"
In 1998, Castro received a public relations boost from the visit to Cuba by Pope John Paul II, who decried the U.S. trade embargo.
Elian Gonzalez saga draws world attention
Still the refugees came, and at last there came one whom Fidel Castro wanted back.
On Nov. 25, 1999, 5-year-old Elian Gonzalez was found floating in an inner tube in the Atlantic Ocean after his mother drowned in an attempt to flee Cuba. Elian was taken in by relatives in Miami who refused to surrender him. His Cuban father said Elian had been kidnapped by his mother, and he should be returned to his homeland. Castro agreed.
For the next six months, the boy became the prize in an international tug-of-war between Cuba and the United States.
Elian became a kind of Cuban Oliver Twist, tugging at heartstrings 90 miles long, across 40 years' memory of rancor and recrimination. Once again, the Cuban dictator showed his extraordinary skill at manipulating American hearts and minds.
Castro triumphed. Relying on international law and common-sense ideals of family ties, he took the moral high ground, staged mass rallies in which thousands of Cubans screamed and wept for the return of Elian.
"We are going to move heaven and earth!" Castro shouted to a cheering crowd in Havana. "It will be a war, an international battle."
Attorney General Janet Reno finally ended the controversy. When the child's Miami relatives defied the authorities, she ordered the Immigration and Naturalization Service to snatch Elian forcibly from Little Havana and return him to Cuba. The raid occurred on April 22, 1999. Some 114 INS agents stormed the house where the boy was being held. The photograph of the terrified child being yanked out of a protector's arms by an INS official holding an M-16 rifle made front pages all over America.
A year later, Elian was reportedly doing well in Cuba, and his father had been given a handsome new house at state expense.
In recent years, a little luster was restored to Castro's authority when his Cuban model influenced international politics in Latin America and he nurtured the likes of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. During the last four years, the island nation has received major financial assistance from Chavez, in the form of oil, and from China, which has provided consumer goods, such as refrigerators and air conditioners.
In June 2001, two hours into a speech, Castro seemed to list to one side and then fainted. Though he returned to the podium later, it was an omen of mortality. And in 2004, he shattered a kneecap and broke an arm when he fell after a speech.
What does this mean for the people in Cuba?" President Bush said at a news conference Tuesday during a trip to Africa. "They're the ones who suffered under Fidel Castro. They're the ones who were put in prison because of their beliefs. They're the ones who have been denied their right to live in a free society. So I view this as a period of transition and it should be the beginning of the democratic transition in Cuba."
Bush said he anticipates debate about Cuba's future, and that some people will say "Let's promote stability."
"In the meantime, political prisoners will rot in prison and the human condition will remain pathetic in many cases," he said.
Last time I respond to you because I don't know what your problem is.
If the government shows they will allow writers to disagree with them, let protests happen, pretty much let the people live like we do in america, free, able to do whatever you want. Then I think we can give em a bit of aid, help out their worst of the worst, and lift the embargo.
Very good points. I'd also like to add...
They could use a little help as well. I mean it's only a genocide that is happening right now.
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