What a surprise that two American tourists vacationing in Cuba under the guise of "people-to-people" contacts discover that there are two worlds in Cuba: One for tourists, and one for the Cuban people:

Local women travel to Cuba and discover two worlds

You may be surprised by the impressions made on two local residents during their recent journey to Cuba.

What they saw was a country in transition. There were elegant, ornate, restored buildings and well-kept vintage American cars from the 1940s and ‘50s, when Cuba was a playground for wealthy Americans. But outside of the tourist world in Havana, the nation’s capital and largest city, most neighborhoods are shabby and run down.

In Havana there are two worlds, one for the tourists and another for the Cubans. The tourists have their own money system, “cucs.” Cubans are forbidden from using this money, as tourists are forbidden from using the Cuban pesos.

This, according to Stelle Sheller and Janet Young, of East Falls and Chestnut Hill, respectively, who traveled to Havana for eight days in mid-October with Global Exchange (GE), an international human rights organization.

“It’s a country of contradictions,” said Sheller. “You would just have to visit to begin to understand the mixture. You leave with more questions than when you came.”

It is a total and complete fallacy that you "have to visit [Cuba] to begin to understand the mixture." All you have to do is read a little history and speak to Cuban exiles or read the plethora of accounts available from them on the internet to understand the reality of Cuba under the dictatorial rule of the Castro family. It is not that complicated: Cuba is a totalitarian dictatorship where the Cuban people are enslaved and oppressed by a brutal and murderous regime. I am sure these retired school teachers did not need to visit pre-Civil War America to know that slavery existed here.