Sen. Boxer: 'Communism Is Dead' in Cuba
NewsMax.com
Sunday, June 2, 2002 11:06 p.m. EDT
California's ultra-left-wing senator, Barbara Boxer, insists that "Communism is dead" in Castro's Cuba.
Boxer made these comments in late May at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing when Otto Reich, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, testified. Boxer was arguing in favor of an amendment to the Trade Bill that would allow private U.S. financing of food sales to Cuba.
Boxer told Reich she is unhappy with the Bush administration's hard-line policy with Cuba, and that she holds a different view after a recent trip to the enslaved island nation.
While admitting that Castro had helped to spread communism, she told Reich and her colleagues: "It's a new day. Comunnism is dead. It's even dead in Cuba. I hate to say it, it's dead."
Boxer's evidence of this new discovery - which has yet make even the liberal New York Times?
She explained, "Castro may think he has communism, but he's got a whole dollar economy going and I went to the restaurants and there's all kinds of capitalism over there."
Boxer's travels to communist countries during the Cold War must have been limited.
Even in Mother Russia at the height of the Cold War, the dollar was king. The Russian "communist" government had restaurants and stores that sold goods to foreigners and citizens for "hard currency," usually dollars.
Why? It was one way the communist state filtered hard currency back into its coffers to continue to build its military-police state.
Cuba, of course, continues to follow the same model. And Boxer apparently has taken time to read the State Department report, as well as those of the left-leaning Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International - all of which report that Castro continues to maintain one of the most repressive communist regimes in the world: no human rights, no property rights, no civil rights.
How can she claim a vibrant capitalist economy exists in Cuba?
One person who didn't cotton to Boxer's claims, and others that say Cuba is not a threat to U.S. security, was maverick Republican Senator John McCain.
Sen. McCain reminded Boxer that on a recent visit to Tehran, Castro said that Iran and Cuba together could "bring America to its knees."
He told Reich that "last year, Jose de la Fuente, the former director of research at Cuba's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, wrote that he was profoundly disturbed about Cuba's sales of dual-use technology to Iran, a member of the Axis of Evil. It sponsors terrorism."
The remark was a not-so-subtle slap at Jimmy Carter, who during his recent trip claimed the U.S. had no evidence Cuba was developing bioweapons or sharing them with rogue states.
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