I Don't Think Miami Mobsters The Diaz-Balarts Will Be Using Orbitz To Book Any Flights Soon

Diaz-Balarts-- holding back progress, upholding a family tradition: fascism

If you're an Orbitz user you probably got an e-mail from their CEO, Barney Harford, yesterday. Something tells me Barney, a Seattle-based Obama campaign donor ($2,300), wouldn't have sent something like this out during the Bush Regime:

At Orbitz we believe passionately in the power of travel to transform lives. And we believe that people should have the freedom to travel wherever they choose.

Americans today have the right to travel to any country in the world except Cuba. Three weeks ago, we launched OpenCuba.org, a campaign that gives people a way to petition U.S. leaders to end the 50-year Cuba travel ban and give all Americans the freedom to travel to Cuba.

With Congress considering the bipartisan Freedom to Travel to Cuba Act, the opportunity to end the 50-year ban hangs in the balance.

Join the movement to give Americans the right to travel wherever they choose when you Sign the petition.

We recognize that some of you may have different perspectives on this subject; however, our position on this is premised on two core beliefs:

• People should have the freedom to travel where they choose
• Travel-- and the resulting exchange of ideas between people from different countries-- can be a powerful force for positive change

Thank you for considering our request to join us on this issue.

Barney Harford
CEO Orbitz Worldwide

It's easy enough to blame the whole tragic Cuba mess-- a tragic mess for half a century-- on pandering and truculent Republicans-- like the gangster family, the Diaz-Balarts, the patriarch having been Minister of the Interior in charge of torture under Batista. After starting one of the first of the violent anti-Castro terror groups and carving out a gangster turf in South Florida for his family, he lived to see his two fanatic sons, Mario and Lincoln become far right Republican congressmen. Look at those two ponem above. They're the last of the die-hard Castro haters who would rather see everyone in Cuba rot and die than see the U.S. and Cuba normalize relations. Yes, it would be very easy to blame it on GOP extremists-- but it wouldn't be accurate.

As Reese Ehrich points out in Dateline Havana: The Real Story of US Policy and the Future of Cuba, many Democrats were pandering to the same crowd of Cuban and Mafia thugs. OK, it was under the Nixon Administration that the U.S. introduced swine flu into Cuba and under Reagan that the CIA infected 350,000 Cubans with dengue fever, Clinton, who campaigned in Florida to the right of George H.W. Bush on Cuban policy, allowed the CIA to spray Matanzas Province with an Asian insect to destroy crops.

Orbitz, of course, sees the bonanza for the travel industry sitting 90 miles off the coast of Florida. But it really does look like Obama will be the first president since Eisenhower to take Cuban policy back into American hands and out of the hands of the fascist first wave refugees who fled the Revolution. This week Newsweek tries to explain the obsession with Cuba:

The usual explanation is that Cuba has a unique symbolic allure. It is the small country that confronted the U.S. empire and has survived despite the attempts by all U.S. presidents since to subdue its communist government. It is the island with iconic leaders like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and the Latin American country that in the language of revolutionaries everywhere embodies the struggle of socialist humanism against the materialism of capitalist societies.

Cuba is also the small nation that in the past sent its troops to die in faraway lands in Latin America and even Africa fighting for the poor... And it is also the country whose progress in health care and education for the majority became the stuff of legend. It is the small country that the United States has unsuccessfully tried to isolate for decades through a variety of means-- including an absurd and useless embargo that hurts the United States more than Cuba. The embargo is the perfect example used by anti-Americans everywhere to expose the hypocrisy of a superpower that punishes a small island while cozying to dictators elsewhere.

The embargo does not hurt the United States more than Cuba. It is bad for some American businesses-- especially in Illinois' 18th congressional district (but no one has explained that to their dim-witted congressman, Aaron Schock, who's more concerned with meeting the fellas in the gym than figuring out what's best for his constituents). But for Cuba it has been absolutely devastating-- as planned, senselessly devastating, but truly crippling for the Cuban people. It's time stop catering to the likes of gangster spawn like the Diaz-Balarts and end this vicious, dysfunctional and inhuman policy towards the Cuban people.