Visit Cuba! Revel in the misery of the enslaved Cuban people
While the Washington Post gives its readers tips on how to "legally" travel to Cuba, American tourists yearning to revel in the misery of the enslaved Cuban people can get a sneak peek of the wondrous sights and sounds created by the despair and anguish of the Cuban people in Canada's Edmonton Journal:
Visit Cuba, where time stands still
Sun-soaked island vacation like a trip into history
It may only be a distance of 150 kilometres away from Florida, but it's light years away in ideology and lifestyle.
What you'll find are oodles of vintage American cars (pre-1959), horse-drawn carriages, cobble-stone streets, intimate courtyards with lush gardens and friendly folk who go about their business with-out cellphones glued to their ears, or thumbs typing out tweets in a social-media frenzy.
It's like stepping back in time. Havana, particularly Old Havana, should be savoured slowly, like a cold Cuba Libre or Mojito. And the best way to do this is with a travel itinerary that includes a Havana/ Varadero combo.
At the historic Hotel Nacional, which welcomed the likes of writer Ernest Hemingway, we enjoyed a poolside dinner and a performance of traditional Cuban music by the Grupo Compay Segundo, named after one of the principal musicians in the Buena Vista Social Club that toured the world and was the subject of a TV documentary.
Then it was on to a full-day escorted bus tour of Old Havana for $19 CUCs, an even better bargain.
Our first stop was the spacious Revolutionary Square, where giant images of national heroes such as Jose Marti, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara look down at the throngs of tourists from all over the world (except the U.S., because of the long-lived embargo on trade.)
Here you will find the National Library and many government minis-tries housed in impressive buildings, some clad in scaffolding, others in need of restoration.
There is nothing like reveling in the misery of others to make you feel better about yourself.
This is obscene. At the very best, it is grotesque, pathological callousness, not to mention de facto complicity with totalitarian evil. Any Canadian who is OK with this, let alone partakes of it, is either a certifiable cretin or something far more common, a contemptible, hypocritical SOB. If only for the sake of dignity, no self-respecting Cuban should have anything to do with anything Canadian as long as this sort of abomination is the order of the day in Canada. How these people even remotely see themselves as decent and respectable defies understanding.