[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 85 (Thursday, June 25, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H5303-H5304]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   ON JACK NICHOLSON'S VISIT TO CUBA

  (Mr. DIAZ-BALART asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. DIAZ-BALART. Madam Speaker, I read in the press this morning that 
a well-known actor by the name of Jack

[[Page H5304]]

Nicholson is right now in Cuba. Not only did he arrive there and 
apparently demonstrate his intention to violate U.S. law, but he 
called, according to the press reports that I read this morning, 
Castro's Cuba a ``paradise.''
  I would recommend to Mr. Nicholson, or to the President of Colombia, 
the gentleman whose visa has been denied to enter the United States 
because of allegations that he received money from the narcotraffickers 
in his campaign for President 4 years ago, I would recommend that both 
of them in the so-called paradise as described by Mr. Nicholson, that 
they seek to visit some of the political prisons, some of the prisons, 
of the hundreds of prisons in Cuba while they are staying in the so-
called paradise.
  There are, just to pick four examples, perhaps the most well-known of 
the leaders of the internal opposition in Cuba, the dissidents, are in 
dungeons in that paradise, according to Mr. Jack Nicholson. The 
dictator in Cuba, who has kept them there since July of 1997, the four 
most well-known leaders of the internal opposition in Cuba, has kept 
them in that dungeon, by the way, for the crime of publishing a 
document entitled ``The Homeland Belongs To All'' in which they call 
for free elections and a peaceful transition to democracy in Cuba. The 
Cuban dictator has not even decided yet what to charge them with. That 
is the so-called paradise, according to Mr. Nicholson.
  So I would urge these millionaire visitors who go to the apartheid 
economy of Castro and partake of the pleasures available due to the 
slavery of the Cuban people, and when they call that so-called workers' 
paradise, as Nicholson did, a paradise, that they ask to visit the 
political prisons, or perhaps the widows or the orphans of the tens of 
thousands of victims of that so-called paradise.
  It is shameful to see the attitude of these Jack Nicholsons of the 
world, the rich who believe they have no limits and who now go to the 
so-called workers' paradise only 90 miles from our shores to partake of 
the forbidden apple in all of its pleasures. It is sickening. It shows 
really the ugliest side of our free enterprise system, that some of 
these people with no conscience and no sensitivity would go and make 
statements like that and violate our laws and not be concerned about 
for 40 years the lack of the most elemental freedoms, the lack of 
democracy, and call a place like that totalitarian nightmare a 
paradise.
  And so shame upon people like Nicholson. And also the President with 
the campaign contributions from the narcotraffickers. Obviously he 
feels comfortable in the land of a head of the narcotraffickers, the 
Cuban dictator.

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