Add Sen. Bill Nelson to the chorus of elected officials who are bothered by the decision to grant Mariela Castro a visa to visit the United States. The niece of Fidel and the daughter of Raul Castro, she's a face of the regime, which has jailed American contractor Alan Gross on trumped up charges.
“Allowing Raul’s daughter to come to the U.S when the regime still holds Alan Gross makes no sense,” Nelson said in a written statement.
Uh-oh. Looks like Nelson's running off the Democratic reservation. The party has been actively battling Republican attacks on Obama for allowing the Castro visa. They note that George W. Bush's administration allowed Castro to visit the United States three times.
But Nelson, who likely will face a tough re-election challenge, likely has no interest in invoking George Bush as a defense of Obama -- especially if the administration makes a move that just doesn't help with the Florida electorate at large and that hurts with the Cuban-American electorate in specific.
I am a registered Democrat also, like Senator Nelson. I agree with him. This makes no sense. Politically, it was also very stupid. I really regret this was done. People should stop referring to Mariela Castro as a gay-rights advocate. She is no such thing. Gay people can't vote in Cuba anymore than straight people can. The regime is a dictatorship. No one in Communist Cuba is free, gay or straight. Mariela Castro is an apologist for the regime in Cuba.
Posted by: Pedro | May 22, 2012 at 05:51 PM
Read what Mariela Castro has to say for yourself and then draw your own conclusions:
Mariela Castro: Socialism with Discrimination is Inconceivable
We cannot believe that by eliminating homophobia we would be eliminating the problem of discrimination in Cuban society. We need to eradicate the trend, the archaic model of an exploitative society that makes up parameters to establish differences and inequalities. We cannot keep on reproducing these.
This is why the educational work we do is aimed at transforming our consciousness, our culture. I hope that at some point our conga against homophobia that is danced along our main avenues becomes a tradition. We’ll have to make it more artistic, find better ideas to make it richer as a cultural option, so that perhaps it becomes a historical tradition and one day, when there is no longer homophobia in Cuba, somebody would say, “remember when in Cuba this was done because there was discrimination and this conga was danced to call people’s attention to the need to eradicate homophobia!”…
This is a small excerpt.
Read the full, detailed interview here:
(April 2012) http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3416.html
Read more here: http://miamiherald.typepad.com/nakedpolitics/2012/05/did-jeb-bushs-brother-george-w-bush-lay-welcome-mat-for-communists-like-barack-obama.html#storylink=cpy
Posted by: Walter Lippmann | May 23, 2012 at 12:36 PM
Mariela Castro: THE HENCHMAN'S DAUGHTER!
Posted by: Zippy | May 23, 2012 at 05:30 PM