Travel to Cuba eased through cultural tours

Old times are coming back...

It's now possible for the average traveler to travel legally to Cuba.

After months of waiting, specialty tour providers this week began getting their U.S. government licenses to offer "people-to-people" trips to the island nation that most Americans have never visited. The people-to-people trips are cultural tours that aim to help people understand one another.

Insight Cuba of New Rochelle, N.Y., is wasting no time launching the tours; it announced Tuesday it will start tours in August that last between three and eight nights, including Havana and Colonial Trinidad; Weekend in Havana; and Havana Jazz Experience (http://www.insightcuba.com/)

Between 2000 and 2004, a brief window opened for people-to-people travel, but it slammed shut again before most tourists could take advantage of it. Many American tourists have traveled illegally to Cuba through Canada or Mexico, but penalties were stiffened. Then last year, the Obama administration indicated it would restore the "people to people" exemption so more Americans could do cultural exchanges.

The new rules still do not allow Cuban beach resort vacations; it emphasizes cultural trips.

BY ELLEN CREAGER

 

Source: Detroit Free Press

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Cuba: Tobacco dollars over public health

In a section of the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", Al Gore talks on the topic of smoking and its harmful effects on human life, but this piece of the film seems to be ignored by Fidel Castro and the Cuban communists, although they are apparently anti-global-warming activists.

Much of the civilized world has begun to pass laws to ban smoking in places that affect other people, as recommended by the World Health Organization; however, as if it were not enough to be one of the only countries still governed by a socialist dictatorship, Cuba also prefers to be one of the few nations to avoid anti-tobacco regulations in order to not harm the earnings of its state tobacco industry.

According to WHO, about 6 million people will die this year because of smoking, not including passive smoking, but in the socialist paradise of the Castro brothers, the "problem" to choose between health and dollars is defined in the style of Wall Street investment bankers, what makes more profit?, where tobacco capitalism wins easily.

While Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and other Latin American countries continue to move to offer its citizens smoke-free spaces, Cuba continues to hold the annual "Habano's Festival", tobacco is still among the top three Cuban export products, and the pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara with cigars in their mouths are part of Latin American communist culture.

A few years ago, the government of Cuba sought to promote anti-tobacco regulations, but they were nullified with the excuse of being intolerable for the people, which sounds highly implausible because we are talking about one of the most repressive dictatorships on the planet.

And in this we have another of the contradictions of Cuban socialism. Fidel prefers to write about the growth of deserts in Africa and toxic emissions in the northern hemisphere, but where he can do something real for life, in Cuba, where the Castro family has dominated for the past 52 years, he chooses to discuss the problems in foreign countries.

Luis Alberto López Rafaschieri and José Alberto López Rafaschieri

Source: From the Beginning

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