El Tumbao Cubano - El Blog de Cuba en el Exilio

Cuba Carefully Watching U.S. Policy in the Making

NPR Morning Edition audio. Sept. 24, 2004.
Cuba's government stays acutely aware of every twist and turn of U.S. politics and policy, down to knowing which congressional subcommittee is meeting on which day at what time. National Parliament Speaker Ricardo Alarcon believes relations between the United States and Cuba are at their lowest point ever, including after the Bay of Pigs crisis. NPR's Tom Gjelten reports...

US House OKs measures to ease Cuba sanctions

By JIM ABRAMS. Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A day after moving to nullify the Bush administration's new rules restricting family travel to Cuba, the House on Wednesday voted to remove barriers to agriculture sales and student exchanges in the island nation...

Bush's Cuban American Support May Be Slipping

DISPATCH FROM CORAL GABLES, FLA.
By John M. Glionna. LA Times Staff Writer September 21, 2004
New limits on travel and remittances to Cuba have turned some former backers against the president, surveys show.
Cuban American Jorge Mursuli is livid over how he says President Bush forced him to break a promise made at his mother's deathbed.

He vowed to her to send money and medicine to his aging aunt still living in Fidel Castro's Cuba. But Bush's new policies restricting travel and remittances to the island — a move aimed at further isolating its communist leader — have stifled that goodwill gesture....

The Bush Regime's Economic Blueprint for Cuba

by Tim Anderson; September 20, 2004
Hidden behind the rhetoric of 'democracy' in the 458 page report titled 'Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba', and underlying the Bush Regime's plan for a 'transition', are all the major features of a US economic blueprint for Cuba. These features can be read in conjunction with packages administered by the US controlled World Bank, in a wide range of indebted developing countries...

The Cuban Connection

Cuban-American Money in U.S. Elections, 1979-2000
This study traces 22 years of federal campaign contributions flowing from the Cuban-American community, and examines how this relates to legislation. In many ways the patterns in Cuban-American political giving revealed in this report confirm common perceptions of the community's ideological leanings. However, the results also show some disparity between perception and reality...

Roots of the Cuban-American Political Movement

MIAMI: It's Not Just for Republicans Anymore!

Signals a "New Day" for Cuban-Americans and Democrats.
Washington, DC - The New Democrat Network (NDN) announced today that prominent Cuban-American leader Joe Garcia is leaving his post as Executive Director of the Cuban American National Foundation and will join NDN as a Senior Advisor and director of NDN's efforts in South Florida...

Cuba's Lonely Dissident

Oswaldo Paya's struggle for democracy in Cuba is so lonely that he can't even count on the support of Florida's Cuban American community.
“I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. I’m a Cuban and what I want is for Cubans to have their own parties and their own free elections.”...

Accord has opened the U.S. to Cubans

IMMIGRATION "It was something that Castro always wanted"
By Nancy San Martin. Posted on Mon, Sep. 06, 2004

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS MIAMI
In the shadow of the best-known and most controversial result of the Cuban balsero crisis in 1994 - the wet-foot/dry-foot policy - more than 230,000 Cubans have legally immigrated to the United States in the past decade.

That quiet inflow of Cubans represents nearly seven times the 35,000 would-be migrants who wound up at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay - another of the searing images from those days when Cubans by the tens of thousands took to inner tubes, homemade rafts and other flimsy vessels in desperate bids to cross the Florida Straits....

Push aims at luring Cuban voters

Download push_aims_at_luring_cuban_voters.htm

Democrats accelerate the push for Cuban-American voters, hiring Cuban American National Foundation executive director Joe Garcia to spread the Democratic agenda.

BY LESLEY CLARK Posted on Thu, Sep. 02, 2004 [email protected]

Joe Garcia, the public face of one of the most influential Cuban-American groups in the country, is stepping down as executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation to lead South Florida recruitment efforts for a Democratic organization.

The move comes as both parties step up their efforts to court the massive Cuban-American voting bloc that has the potential to sway a close election in Florida. President Bush is to share the stage tonight at the Republican National Convention with his former housing secretary, Mel Martinez, who, if elected, would be the first Cuban-American U.S. senator.

But Garcia and officials with the Washington, D.C.-based New Democrat Network, said his hiring underscores what polls show is an emerging political division in a community traditionally viewed as staunchly Republican.

Republicans clash on Cuba in the final days

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CAMPAIGN 2004 | U.S. SENATE Posted on Mon, Aug. 30, 2004

The candidates for U.S. Senate crisscross the state in the final days of the campaign in which the Republican front-runners continue to clash.

BY MARC CAPUTO [email protected]

As the nasty exchanges over abortion and gay rights subsided, the front-running Republicans in the U.S. Senate race found one last area of disagreement Sunday: Democracy in Cuba.

Standing at the Versailles Restaurant with exile community leader Rafael Diaz-Balart, former Congressman Bill McCollum bashed opponent Mel Martinez on Sunday for his ''support'' of the Varela Project, a nascent Democracy movement in Cuba sanctioned by Fidel Castro.

McCollum, speaking in the county that could give Martinez the edge if Hispanic turnout is heavy Tuesday, called the Varela Project ``a terrible undemocratic policy that I would never support.''

But Martinez said he doesn't favor the Varela Project. He said his opponent was misrepresenting a White House-sanctioned speech in which he spoke favorably of the movement but failed to condemn its founder, who opposes the embargo against the island.

''I have the same position as McCollum,'' Martinez said. ``The Varela Project is not the answer to Cuba's problems.''