Stetson University business students to party in Cuba for Spring Break
Naturally, they are calling this spring break trip to Cuba by international business students from Stetson University an educational experience, but let us be honest here: What in the world can business students learn from the corrupt, criminal, and illegal business activities of the Castro dictatorship? I am sure it is no coincidence that this trip to Cuba was scheduled for Spring Break.
Via the Daytona Beach News Journal:
Stetson international business students head to Cuba
A group of Stetson University students from the international business department left Saturday to go to Cuba over Spring Break.
Bill Andrews, chairman of the management and international business department at the DeLand university, and another professor took nine students for a week from the junior seminar "Business and Culture in Cuba" to experience the country firsthand.
The group plans to spend five days in Havana and two days in the historic Cienfuegos area. They will meet with a number of government and business leaders from Cuba; officials from the U.S. government and students from the University of Havana. Historical and cultural sites are on the agenda, too.
I guess no future business leaders would be complete without first attending a few mojito tasting parties and taking a few salsa dance lessons in Castro's Cuba.
I always say this, but I'm going to repeat it. We've been very ineffectual in getting our message across. The regime on the other hand has hammered in the notion via every platform imaginable--diplomatic, television, periodicals, books, conferences, symposiums, etc..-- that Cuba is the forbidden fruit, that you must see it before it changes. The fact that it's seen as a "David" against the "Goliath" to the North only adds to its mystic.
In other to neutralize us, we've been villainized worst than any peoples in recent history. We have been labeled "irrational", "chihuahuas," "immature," "batistianos," "banana republic [types]," "anti-Americans," "hate-filled," "revenge seakers," "right-wingers," "aging," "emotional," "troglodytes," "nostalgic," etc...
We can't expect sympathy or understanding from anyone. Fifty-three years of exile should have taught us that lesson is anything. We probably aren't even on the radar of these Stetson University students.
That said, instead of being proactive, we are not. We have no campaign to counter the regime's incessant campaign. It's incredible that after more than 50 years in exile, we have no English language newspapers or magazines, we don't support our film makers, we don't sponsor sympathetic chairs in Universities, we don't have an anti-defamation league, and we allow people like Saladrigas to take over that student group "Roots of Hope." In fact, the castroites are always infiltrating our groups. Remember the Cuban Museum and how it was essentially destroyed by the likes of Cesnuda.
Ray, we have to stop kidding ourselves. We've been screwed by practically everybody from Day 1 and before that, for over half a century now, and nothing's going to change unless Cubans themselves do what the situation requires. I'm not even talking about getting the blind to see and the deaf to hear, because, for the most part, they're willfully blind and willfully deaf. Either they don't care about Cuba's tragedy or they support it one way or another. It's not about them; it's about us, on and off the island. Either we get serious and ACT like it, or we can forget the whole thing.