One of the foreign policy relics of the Cold War is the chilly relationship the U.S. has dictated between us and Cuba. The biggest effect of that ban has been the degrading conditions in the Carribbean Communist nation. I know friends that ship hundreds of dollars worth of stuff down there so they can have basic necessities like bedding, clothes and appliances.
Our government's embargo seems to be subject to whether Fidel Castro is alive or dead and American business interests are itching to go down there and develop the moment they throw the first shovel of dirt on Castro's casket. Meanwhile the U.S. punishes the island nation and penalizes Americans for traveling to Cuba, sometimes only with a warning letter and other times with fines up to $65,000. So when the Beacon School in Manhattan defies that ban and sends students to Cuba for spring break anyway, it makes the news and politicians are seen squirming.
From The New York Times:
Mr. Klein, at a news conference yesterday, said that the trip had not been approved by the Education Department and that the matter was now under investigation. “It should not have happened,” Mr. Klein said. “We expressly said no.”
Officials said yesterday that they had been unaware of the school’s previous trips to Cuba, in 2004 and 2005, prompting questions from Mr. Paterson.
“As a parent,” Mr. Paterson said by telephone, “I was a little concerned that a group of schoolchildren went to Cuba and the Department of Education didn’t know about it.”
He said that the school had clearly approved the trip when his stepdaughter, Ashley Dennis, went and that it had been highly educational.
So it seems that some politicians are at odds against each other, those that follow our misbegotten policy and the others that have gone or seen their children go to Cuba with the Beacon School. Look, I am all for following the laws of my government but when a law is bad people will ignore it en masse and when it is a travel ban to another country, that is just unbecoming for a democratic nation such as ours. Besides, why are they so up in arms? Does the educational factor scare them (or anyone that wants to go to Cuba really)? Will unwitting Americans go there and magically become Communists and spread the political ideology across the United States when they return, smoking their Cuban cigars all the way? Or perhaps it might be something else:
The controversial trip was first reported yesterday in The New York Post. As in past years, the trip was led by Nathan Turner, a history teacher who accompanied the students along with one set of parents. Ruth Lacey, the principal of Beacon, declined to comment.This year’s trip included interviews of a 15-year-old prostitute and of a homeless man in Havana, and also a visit to La Zorra y El Cuervo — the Fox and the Crow — an Afro-Cuban jazz club in the Vedado section of Havana, where two of the students jammed with the musicians.
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