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The USA's Cuba Vendetta
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Progreso Weekly - Jan 10, 2008
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=290&Itemid=1
The Cuba Vendetta
By Max J. Castro
The amazing thing about U.S. policy toward Cuba is that it seems
impervious to the test of reality. Nearly fifty years of failure, the
end of the Soviet bloc, and the emergence of new threats to U.S.
national security have not produced a rethinking. Instead, what has
happened is that counterproductive approach long-maintained by the
federal government has become more perverse. That has not prevented the
state of Florida from taking it up with a vengeance.
Consider:
* The determination to wage economic war against Cuba, even at the most
trivial level, is distracting the U.S. government from the much more
crucial task of pursuing terrorists and criminals.
A Government Accountability Office report on the efforts of the Customs
and Border Protection (CBP) division of the Department of Homeland
Security to catch those bringing cigars, rum, and similar goods from
Cuba have strained CPBs capacity to carry out its primary mission of
keeping terrorists, criminals and inadmissible aliens from entering the
country at Miami International Airport.
* Top State of Florida officials were intimately involved in the costly
and highly unusual attempt by the Department of Children and Families
to prevent Rafael Izquierdo, a Cuban farmer, from retaining custody of
his young daughter and returning with her to Cuba.
According to a source quoted in a Miami Herald story, Nothing is done
[regarding the case] without running it through the governors office.
Julie Gilbert Rosicky, the head of an agency hired to do a home study
on Rafael Izquierdo, wrote -- of a guardian ad litem who sided with the
state in the effort to strip Izquierdo of custody -- that she appeared
very biased in favor of keeping the child in the U.S. no matter what,
and indicated that she wished for a negative report.
Said the highly experienced judge who heard the case, which cost the
state $250,000, Ive never seen a case like that... ever, ever, ever,
ever..."
* A law passed by the Florida legislature last year that prevents
professors at state universities from using either public or private
funds to conduct research in Cuba runs afoul of the academic freedom
accorded to universities under the First Amendment, according to a
lawsuit filed by the Board of Governors of the state university system.
These three examples suggest that nothing is too important, sacred, or
central to American values -- including the fight against terrorism,
the right of parents to raise their children, and the First Amendment
- -- not to be subordinated to the vendetta against Cuba.
*
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