re: Just back from 8 days in Havana, Cuba

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I mean how do you justify that?

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Lou, there certainly were a few Cubans I spoke to who wanted to know about the "American Dream". They think it really exists and that everything will be wonderful once they are in the U.S. The American Dream is the U.S.'s facade.

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My family came to America as refugees in 1975 with absolutely nothing. Within 15 years we were living the American dream. My father became an engineer, my mother an accountant. All 3 children attended and graduated from Tulane (2) and one from Syracuse.

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Also revealing of the misery and desperation created by the Castro regime is Cuba's suicide rate, which reached 24 per thousand in 1986 -- making it double Latin America's average, making it triple Cuba's pre-Castro rate, making Cuban women the most suicidal in the world, and making death by suicide the primary cause of death for Cubans aged 15-48. At that point the Cuban government ceased publishing the statistics on the self-slaughter. The figures became state secrets. The implications seem to horrify even the government.[8]

In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than any Latin American country and half of Europe. I'll quote a UNESCO report from 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class. Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers....the average wage for an 8 hour day in Cuba 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 68 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans were covered by Social legislation, that's a higher percentage than in the U.S. at the time."

In 1958 Cubans had the 3rd highest protein consumption in the hemisphere. But in 1962 Castro's government introduced ration cards that persist to this day. While comparing a Cubans' daily rations as mandated by Castro's government to the daily rations of Cuban slaves as mandated by the Spanish King in 1842, an intrepid Cuban exile uncovered this fascinating info

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free education through college including books,

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My family came to America as refugees in 1975 with absolutely nothing. Within 15 years we were living the American dream. My father became an engineer, my mother an accountant. All 3 children attended and graduated from Tulane (2) and one from Syracuse. The American dream is no facade. It's there, you just got to work for it.

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I have family in Miami who came to the US as refugees. They became wealthy, materialistic citizens who could care less about anyone else. They won't have anything to do with anyone that is not on the same socio-economic level that they are on. That includes their relatives who were already in the US and helped them get to where they are today.

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