Canadian Trade, Tourists & Foreign Aid enable this Police State to make all this and more possible

The Globe and Mail is carrying a cautionary story of a Cuban-Canadian woman, Onelia Ross who made the mistake of traveling to her native Cuba with two friends for a vacation just like a half a million Canadian visitors did last year. Upon entry into Cuba presented Ms. Ross presented her newly issued Cuban passport as per Cuba’s entry laws and was promptly thrown into prison for a bureaucratic mix-up by the Cuban Embassy in Canada for failing to put the appropriate entry permit in her passport

"They held me for five days while they investigated the case and they didn't let me call a lawyer," Ms. Ross said from her Ottawa home. "It was an undignified way to be treated over essentially a bureaucratic mix-up. When you're in Cuba you have no rights whatsoever." She also said she was manhandled by her jailors and suffered bruising and scrapes. But worst of all was the psychological trauma. "This is what a police state is like."
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They detained her for four hours, and then told her they were transporting her to Havana where she would be placed in an immigration detention centre. On board the plane, Ms. Ross says she bribed a security guard into allowing her to call her family in Havana when she landed. At the detention centre, she was searched, and her money and belongings locked up. "They didn't let me take a change of clothing or a bar of soap, nothing," she said.

She shared a cell with a Cuban-American who also lacked the proper entry documents, and a Mexican woman engaged to a Cuban. The Mexican woman had been denied entry because officials didn't believe her relationship with her fiancé was genuine. "The jail was dirty and there was no water. I slept on a metal bed. Written on the walls were the telephone numbers of all the foreign embassies and notes about how much the prisoners had suffered," Ms. Ross said.

After several interviews, Cuban officials finally allowed her to contact the Canadian embassy for consular assistance. Canadian officials visited her in prison and made inquiries on her behalf. After five days she was released and put on a plane to Ottawa. Cuban authorities kept the $500 (U.S.) in cash that Ms. Ross was carrying, saying it covered the cost of feeding her for five days, and flying her from Holguin to Havana.
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"It was an honest bureaucratic mix-up that could have been resolved," she said. Ms. Ross says the experience saddened her as she realized how terrorized Cubans are. "They are so scared of the government and are scared to talk to you. One of the guards apologized for treating us harshly, saying he would lose his job if he didn't." She said she is speaking out now because she wants the half million Canadian tourists who visit the Caribbean island every year to be aware of the country's dark underbelly. "Canadian tourists don't see what is going on in Cuba because they're only taken to the resorts. They don't see the reality," she said.

This socialist’s paradise thought nothing of incarcerating and physically harming a Canadian citizen for the incompetence of Cuban bureaucrats in Canada and then charges her US$500 for her forced stay in a Cuban prison.
When Canadians choose to trade or spend their dollars in Cuba they become nothing more than silent collaborators with a communist police state that makes this and all other forms of thuggery possible. Taken from the Seattle PI Newsource (Via Babalu Blog)

It was supposed to be a friendly baseball game. But hours before a neighborhood youth group was to play a team from the U.S. mission in Havana, Cuban security agents confiscated the baseballs, bats and mitts.

The agents charged into the home of activist Marcos de Miranda to grab the sports gear, family members said, in the latest and among the most bizarre in a long history of harassment targeting this family of dissidents opposed to communist President Fidel Castro, himself a well known lover of baseball. "It was to be a sports and cultural event - nothing at all political," de Miranda, 28, said in his family's crumbling apartment. "We're denied even the right to play our national sport."
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The baseball equipment had been sent to de Miranda from an exile group in Florida. A bicycle, which he won in an essay contest from an anti-communist group in the Czech Republic, was also confiscated. According to the family, state security agents arrived at the apartment the afternoon before the game. Marcos de Miranda was not there, but his parents were taken to government offices for questioning.

Roberto de Mirando said he was threatened with jail if he didn't control his son's activities. He said he was told the baseball game couldn't take place because the Americans hadn't gotten permission. "I want them to leave this family alone!" said Rivas, the mother. "We are not going to change. Our ideas will stay the same. "Roberto de Miranda, who appeared weak from his ailments, said his family's resolve is unshaken. “They want to silence this family, but I don't think that's possible," he said. "And as a father, I cannot tell my son to retreat from the opposition - he's doing nothing wrong."

Last year a half a million Canadians visited Cuba (according to the Canadian Embassy’s Cuba website) seeking to escape the cold and snow by making Cuba the destination of choice. Cuba has sand, sun and surf as well as being one of the most affordable holiday Caribbean destinations available to Canadians.

A great many Canadians approve of their government’s special relationship with Cuba and Fidel Castro. Many Canadians take it as a point of pride that Canada does not side politically with their American neighbors over Cuba and has maintained not only friendly and trade relations but foreign aid as well.

Let me present you with this information found on the Embassy of Cuba'swebsite detailing the Canadian government’s largess with funds from the public purse:

Links of economic cooperation with Canada were resumed in 1994 with specific donations aimed to food programs and the public health care sector. Since 1996, two Canadian-International-Development-Agency-(CIDA)–founded programs have been developed; the first from 1996 to 2000 and the second from 2000 to 2004. Recently, a third program (2004-2009), the first long-term program, was agreed on, with a budget of 22.5 millions in Canadian dollars, independently of the resources allocated to other cooperation projects with universities, NGO’s and other institutions.

The first two programs of cooperation were centred in the fields of macro economy, health, food aid and security, environment, while in the present program, the fields of macro economy, community development, and health are developed on mutual basis. In the field of community development, the five eastern provinces are given priority.

In the year 2004, though it was the end of the second program and beginning of the third, a high level of operation was kept, with around 90 projects being developed by the end of the 2004. That year, a very significant contribution was the donation by the NGO Medical Equipment Modernization Opportunity (MEMO), made up by 11 40-feet containers of medical equipment and accessories for the National System of Health, worth 6,5 millions of Canadian dollars. Two hospitals, one in Placetas and another one in Santa Clara, Villa Clara province, were beneficiated by this donation.

It must be outlined that during the period 1995-2004, the NGO Health Partners International of Canada (HPIC) has kept a steady relation with MINSAP (Cuban Ministry of Health) and MINVEC (Cuban Ministry for Foreign Investment and Cooperation), donating medical equipment and accessories, medicines, and vaccines, worth 30 millions of Canadian dollars, taking into account our priorities.

Cuba’s health care system is being funded directly by our tax dollars and as long as Canadians and our government choose to spend their trade, holiday or tax dollars in Cuba; you are collaborating and enabling the Castro government to continue to enslave its people.

(G&M story tipped off by Neale News)