No Photos Allowed
There are long standing arguments about traveling to Cuba. I'm not talking about Cubans visiting their homeland, but about the useful idiots who travel there and then come back and extol the virtues of castro's revolution.
They talk about how great the healthcare system is, how wonderful and happy the people are, the quaint charm of the island locked in a time capsule of the 1950's.You try telling them that they only saw what castro allowed them to see. "Oh no" they insist, it's a lie, that's just those Cuban mafia types in Miami, Cuba's great.
In Cuba, castro controls information. This past week he's been having fits over that sign on the US interests section displaying a ticker of uncensored information. Cubans are denied access to the internet, TV and radio broadcasts are controlled by the state. Sports teams and other Cubans allowed to travel are surrounded by security agents who control their movement. Information from outside Cuba that deviates from the strict party line is diligently suppressed.
But it's not only information coming into Cuba that castro worries about. There's a reason why tourist resorts are segregated from the real Cuba. There's a reason why visitors are taken on tours of sites that are carefully fabricated to propagandize his revolution.
For 47 years he's been lying to the world about Cuba and his revolution. With the MSM at his side, the awful truth about the executions, the concentration camps, the torture, the gulag prisons and the horror of daily life in Cuba has been suppressed. No information allowed, that's why so much media time is spent discrediting the Cuban exile community. Only castro's version of Cuba is acceptable. And he especially doesn't want you see photos of the real Cuba. Even if that means roughing up tourists.
From the Prague Daily Monitor:
Czech model Helena Houdova briefly detained in Cuba
Czech supermodel Helena Houdova and psychologist Mariana Kroftova were detained in Cuba on Monday when Houdova was taking photographs of a slum in the capital of Havana, Reuters news agency reported today. The two women spent 11 hours in police custody.
Houdova, Czech Miss 1999 has lived for a second year mainly in New York and Los Angeles doing modeling. At the same time she tries to raise money to help children with social and health handicaps in nine countries the world over. One of its projects is the Sunflower foundation fund. Houdova said that she went to Cuba to find out how she could help children in the communist country.
She said that during their detention neither she nor Kroftova were allowed to contact the Czech embassy.
They were released after they pledged in writing that they will not join any "counter-revolutionary activities" in the country, Houdova said.
They were also ordered not to leave Havana until Sunday when they are to end their stay in the country. Cuban police also confiscated Houdova's film, but she said she had succeeded in hiding the memory card from her digital camera in her bra.
"They screamed at us. We were afraid," Houdova said, adding "we grew up under communism and know what it is like."
Czech-Cuban political relations have been frozen since the fall of communism in then Czechoslovakia in 1989. The reason is the Czech criticism of the ruling political regime in Cuba.
The Czech Republic has tried several times to push through the U.N. resolutions criticising the state of human rights in Cuba.
Cuban authorities detained among others Jan Bubenik and deputy Ivan Pilip who met local dissidents during their private stay in Cuba in 2001.
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