“Governor Andrew M. Cuomo returned Tuesday evening (in April, 22, 2015) from a two-day trade mission to Cuba where more than a dozen New York industry leaders worked together with Cuban officials to find ways to start new economic partnerships as the U.S. and Cuba begin the process of normalizing relations.”
Two years later the non-partisan and New York-based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, Inc. determined that Cuba had not purchased so much as a penny’s worth of goods from any of the 7 New York-based companies whose honchos accompanied Cuomo on his Cuba junket, which reportedly cost New York taxpayers in excess of $10,000.
(Special note: nothing documented in this article (or in the exposes’ of his sexual harassments approaches the tragic criminality of Cuomo’s complicity in the nursing home deaths. But those have been documented by many elsewhere. As usual, I’ll write about my “specialty,” such as it is.)
Ah! But the photo-ops in Havana were abundant for Cuomo.
One shows the good governor whooping it up with Cuban apparatchiks Josefina Vidal and Gustavo Machin. Both of these apparently delighted (in the pics) companions of Cuomo are KGB-spies who were booted from the U.S. in 2003 for espionage. They were exposed and booted from the U.S. shortly before the invasion of Iraq and were highly suspected of trafficking U.S. military secrets.
The laughing and exuberant (in the pic with Cuomo) Machin and Vidal were suspected of being accomplices of Castro’s master-spy Ana Belen Montes, who serves a 25-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2002 for the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Defense Department in modern history. Machin and Vidal were probably neck deep in the same spying as their Castroite accomplice Montes, but enjoyed “diplomatic immunity,” which saved them from prison or the electric chair.
As mentioned, as a business trip, the much-heralded Cuomo Cuba junket proved a farce. But regarding the possibilities for the governor and his entourage that evening, I’d be remiss in not mentioning the following:
“In Cuba, the link between tourism and prostitution is perhaps more direct than in any other country that hosts sex tourists,” reported the End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism Network in a study titled Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism in Cuba.”
“Since she (a Cuban woman or girl) is usually desperate, he (a sex tourist) can usually secure sexual access to her very cheaply. Sex tourists state that it costs them less to spend two weeks indulging themselves in Cuba than it does in other centers of sex tourism such as Thailand. Girls aged 14-15 are even more desperate for dollars and therefore more vulnerable,” wrote Dr. Julia O’Connell Davidson of Britain’s University of Nottingham in her study titled “The Rights and Wrongs of Prostitution."
"My job was to bug their hotel rooms. Famous Americans are the priority objectives of Castro's intelligence. When the celebrity visitors arrived at the Hotels Nacional, Meliá Habana and Meliá Cohiba, we already had their rooms completely bugged with sophisticated taping equipment. But not just the rooms, we'd also follow the visitors around, sometimes we covered them 24 hours a day. They had no idea we were tailing them," explained high-ranking Cuban intelligence defector Delfin Fernandez.
The above quotes describe the desperation of the brutalized and impoverished residents of a nation that prior to the glorious Castro/Che revolution enjoyed a higher per capita income than Japan and half the nations of Europe and that welcomed more immigrants (primarily from Europe) per-capita than the U.S. Prior to the glorious Communist liberation people were as desperate to enter Cuba as they are now to escape.
For many folks who grew up in pre-Castro Cuba an amateur film by Canadian Andrew Lindy titled “The Cuba Prostitution Documentary” proved more heart-breaking than anything they’d seen on their homeland to that date. Lindy, by the way, is a Canadian and winner of the Canadian National Magazine Award—hence no “Cuba exile with an axe to grind!”
“Prostitution is rampant,” he narrates upon his visit to Cuba as a tourist in 2011. Indeed, during his entire stay Lindy was hard-pressed to find a single Cuban woman or girl who wouldn’t offer sex for pay, of some sort. And half the males he encountered were at least part-time pimps.
Oh, I know…I know. That pre-Castro Cuba was “Bordello to the Americas!’ is a Fake News/Fake History mantra. But actually:
In 1961 the Castroites rounded up what they determined were all the prostitutes in Cuba and herded them into re-education camps to learn more seemly professions--Milicianas, for instance. The total number of women rounded up in this “brothel of the Americas!” as the Fake News/Hollywood mantra has claimed for over half a century was about 14,000, (out of a Cuba population of 6.7 million at the time).
But a study by the American Journal of Nursing a few years ago estimated there were 50,000 prostitutes in New York City alone.
Indeed, the blatant fakeness of the KGB-concocted propaganda meme about pre-Castro Cuba as a “big brothel!” was exposed and demolished years ago. In brief, Fredo Corleone would find many, MANY more hookers in Castro’s Havana than he did during Godfather II.
Oh…almost forgot! A few months after Cuomo’s Cuba junket Raul Castro himself visited his satrapy’s UN mission in New York. “My dream is to drop two atomic bombs on New York City!” Raul Castro had snickered to a henchman back in June of 1960. But New York governor Andrew Cuomo seemed non- plussed as he smilingly cut-up with the terror-sponsoring Stalinist mass-murderer for a few more photo-ops.
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