Sloppy, Sloppy, Sloppy

I really didn't comment about President Bush's address in Tampa alleging that Fidel Castro has been luring sex tourists to Cuba. In today's Los Angeles Times, however, this quote attributed to Castro by President Bush in the speech is worth noting:

''The dictator welcomes sex tourism,'' said Bush, who used a speech devoted to the crime of human trafficking to lash into Castro, in an apparent defense of his controversial election-year crackdown on travel to Cuba.

Bush said Castro ''bragged about the industry,'' quoting him as saying: "Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world.'' [my emphasis]

The White House cited the source of the quote as a paper written by Charles Trumbull who was then an undergraduate at Dartmouth. According to Trumbull, however, Bush's use of the quote (which Trumbull says was actually paraphrased) was not just out of context, but completely offbase:

But regardless of the exact wording, Trumbull says the president's speech misconstrued the meaning, which he says should have been clear from his paper.

"It shows that they didn't read much of the article," Trumbull said in a telephone interview.

According to Trumbull, who conducted field research in Cuba, prostitution boomed in the Caribbean nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, providing an important source of currency for the Cuban economy. Castro, who outlawed prostitution when he took power in 1959, initially had few resources to combat it. But beginning around 1996, Cuban authorities began to crack down on the practice.

Although prostitution still exists, Trumbull said, it is far less visible, and it would be inaccurate to say the government promotes it.

Even when Castro made the remarks, Trumbull said, he was not boasting about Cuba's prostitutes as sex workers.

"Castro was merely trying to emphasize some of the successes of the revolution by saying 'even our prostitutes our educated,' " Trumbull said. "Castro was trying to defend his revolution against negative publicity. He was in no way bragging about the opportunities for sex tourism on the island."

Here is what Castro actually said:

"There are hookers, but prostitution is not allowed in our country," Castro told Cuba's National Assembly in July 1992, according to a translation by the British Broadcasting Corp. "There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily…. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest number of AIDS cases."

I have to agree with this comment:

Julia Sweig, a Cuba expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was one thing for an undergraduate to include an unsubstantiated quotation in a college paper, but it was another for the White House to include one in a presidential speech.

"That's incredibly sloppy, and it shows that when it comes to Cuba policy, they are willing to cut huge corners," Sweig said.

This makes me angry. It makes me angry because there are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize Castro's regime. In their haste to come up with something sensational to appeal to his base in Florida, Bush's staff has sacrificed credibility on the altar of political expediency. Who benefits from this? I would imagine Fidel Castro does. The Bush administration has yet again enabled Castro to portray this as a dispute between the United States and Cuba and taken the focus again off his brutal rule. Despite the public outrage in Cuba, I have a feeling that Castro is puffing on a cigar saying "God, I hope that this cretin gets reelected! He's been the best thing for me since Elián Gonzalez."

This does nothing to help the cause of freedom and democracy in Cuba. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Comments

[Mark Rushton]

No surprise... this fits into the Bush regime's modus operandi nicely. Say it, say it again, and keep saying it until people give up trying to correct you. Deception has been the hallmark of this government since the day tens of thousands of black Floridian voters were barred from casting ballots against him.