Cuba's Craigslist

Thanks to Bodylastics for the response. I recommend he read a little more closely and get away from his Miami-centric world more often. I never said "all" Cubans "only" want a green card so as to return to Cuba. I said recently arrived Cubans are extremely anxious to get their green cards so that they can return to Cuba. This is accurate. When we discuss Cuban "refugees" today, we are not talking about Bodylastics nor his 80 year old father who left Cuba in the wake of the popular rebellion which overthrew the mafia-back and U.S. government backed Batista dictatorship on Jan. 1, 1959. I was referring to the majority of today's Cuban refugees (as well as the asylees, winners of the 'bombo', and family reunification cases) who are in their majority in no way "persecuted". Even the so-called "political refugees" from Cuba are returning to Cuba within two to four years, taking significant amounts of cash, renting cars, touring the entire island, visiting family and friends, and vacationing on the beaches. We are not talking about truly "political refugees" from parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East who face long-term incarceration, threats of death, or long-years of near starvation in barbed wired camps. We are not even talking about the desperate Haitians fleeing what are truly devastating economic and political tragedy without protection from the ever-so-humanitarian U.S. government. Ever since the followers of the Mas-Canosa line in the anti-Castro movement botched and lost the Elian Gonzalez battle in Miami in 1999, the U.S. government has made a point of distributing more and more new Cuba arrivals around the U.S., rather than just Miami. These arrivals generally are in Miami only overnight before going to their new destinations and thus avoid the indocrination and intimidation of the Miami scene. These folks are not the rabid, foaming at the mouth extremists one might stereotype Cubans as and have much more nuanced and real perspectives on Cuba than the "many Cubans in Florida who are Republicans" who, as Bodylastic says, "have consistently voted and supported candidates who were against opening up the borders to Cuba." (And just an aside, it is not as if the "borders to Cuba" are exactly closed, given that nearly 10% of all Cubans live in the U.S. and come and go between the two countries.) Yes, Bodylastics is parially correct in stating that some travel to Cuba is illegal, though incorrect to suggest it is illegal for all "American" citizens. Cuban-Americans who are U.S. citizens, U.S. diplomats, and those U.S. citizens who can meet the U.S. Treasury Department's rules restricting our "basic freedom" to travel are able to travel to Cuba legally. I myself have spent two months in Cuba. The fact that Bodylastics does not "wish to return" to Cuba does not mean that he can not. Nor does it mean he represents the view of all Cuban-Americans, large numbers of whom return to Cuba, nor those Cubans who are urgently awaiting the arrival of their green card so that they can return to Cuba. (I personally know a Cuban man who, a few years after arrival in the U.S., returned to Cuba to die.) In conclusion, I wonder if Bodylastic's 80 year old father still says, "Para el ano que viene, nos vemos en la Habana" ("Next year, we will see each other in Havana", a long ago irrelevant and absurd anti-Castro mantra of those Cubans who anticipated Uncle Sam getting behind their dreams of return to non-revolutionary Cuba). Old anti-Castro pipe dreams die hard.