[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 105 (Thursday, July 15, 2010)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5949-S5951]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                            CUBA TRAVEL BAN

  Mr. MENENDEZ. I have come to the floor many times to speak out about 
the Castro regime's abuses of the Cuban people. Today, I come to the 
floor once again, this time in strong opposition to any attempt in this 
Chamber to pass any bill that in any way lifts or lessens the travel 
ban on Cuba. I wish to make it absolutely clear that I will oppose and 
filibuster, if I need to, any effort to ease regulations that stand to 
enrich a regime that denies its own people basic human rights. I do not 
want to obstruct the business of this Chamber, but I know my colleagues 
on both sides of the aisle are well aware of how deeply I feel about 
freeing the people of Cuba from the repressive regime under which they 
have suffered for too long.
  The fact is, the big corporate interests behind this misguided 
attempt to weaken the travel ban could not care less whether the Cuban 
people are free. They care only about opening a new market and 
increasing their bottom line. This is about the color of money, not the 
desire for freedom.
  The very fact that a travel bill has moved through the House 
Agriculture Committee makes one wonder why American agricultural 
interests would even care about tourist travel to Cuba. One can only 
assume it is about generating increased tourism dollars for the Castro 
regime to buy more agricultural products. That would only serve to 
enrich the regime and do absolutely nothing to bring democracy to the 
island.
  Let's be clear. Those who believe that increasing travel will 
magically breed democracy in Cuba are simply dead wrong. For years, the 
world has been traveling to Cuba and nothing has changed. Millions of 
tourists from democratic nations have visited Havana, and the Castro 
regime has not loosened its iron grip on its people. It has not ended 
its repressive policies. It has not stopped imprisoning and brutally 
abusing prodemocracy forces.
  Now, sometimes I wonder; those who lament our dependence on foreign 
oil because it enriches regimes and terrorist states such as Iran 
should not have a double standard when it comes to enriching a brutal 
dictatorship such as Cuba right here in our own backyard.
  How coincidental that suddenly, now that the Congress is considering 
lifting a travel ban, the Castro regime is hoping the world will 
believe it will release 52 prisoners of conscience. Well, let's set the 
record straight. Many people are wrongly under the impression--wrongly, 
reading and watching media reports--that 52 political prisoners have 
already been released and are free in Cuba. The fact is, only about 
seven have been released, and forcibly--forcibly--deported from their 
country--another human rights violation--instead of allowing them to 
stay and peacefully advocate for change within their own country.
  So even when the regime releases people whose simple crime was trying 
to peacefully create change in their country and who get imprisoned for 
years for that peaceful act, then when they are released, they are 
released only with the understanding that they will be deported out of 
their country so they can no longer be advocates, peaceful advocates, 
for civil society and democratic change. Imagine if those of us who are 
Americans could be arrested simply because we disagreed with the 
government, sought to peacefully change it, and then ultimately, after 
being arrested for years, were deported to some other country in the 
world.
  The remaining 47 prisoners are set to be released but not now, not 
tomorrow, not next week, not even next month, but sometime during the 
next 3 to 4 months, we are told--or so the regime says.
  According to reports in the Miami Herald, nine of those prisoners 
have said they will refuse to leave for Spain if released, and many who 
were released and forcibly deported to Madrid have vowed to continue 
their activism in exile. They have told reporters they feel the shock 
of being forced to leave their country. Omar Rodriguez Saludes told a 
reporter he feels ``like I was still in prison. I left behind part of 
my family. I still feel like I have the cuffs on my hands.''
  The released men said conditions in the prison were horrendous. They 
shared their cells with rats. Diseases infested the prison. And they 
told of inmates trying to kill themselves or do themselves bodily harm 
because of the squalid prison conditions they were forced to endure. 
Remember, these are political prisoners, not people who committed 
common crimes.
  Julion Cesar Galvez, one of the dissidents, told reporters:

       The hygiene and health conditions in prisons in Cuba are 
     not terrible--they're worse than terrible. We had to live 
     with rats and cockroaches and excrement. It's not a lie.

  Galvez, a 66-year-old journalist who was sentenced to 15 years simply 
because of what he sought to write, 15 years of his life in these 
horrible prisons, said:

       There were outbreaks of dengue fever and tuberculosis.

  He said there were more than 1,500 prisoners in the prison in Villa 
Clars--40 prisoners to a cell measuring 32 square feet.
  Another prisoner, Norman Hernandez, said:

       The prisoners are tired of demanding their rights . . . 
     They lose all hope. They lose their desire to live, and they 
     try to hurt themselves so they will get attended to.

  These men were lucky to be released, but they will not give up. They 
will continue to tell their stories, and they will continue to fight 
for freedom for all Cubans.
  It took the regime one night in March to arrest these 52 people--one 
night. That scooped up 52 people who were peacefully advocating for 
change in their own country. So we might ask ourselves: If it took you 
one night to arrest 52 political prisoners, why will it take 4 months 
to release all of them?
  It is not a coincidence that during the next 3 or 4 months, there 
will be Members of the Congress who will be looking to provide the 
Castro regime with billions of dollars of added tourism revenue. It is 
not a coincidence that in September, the European Union will once again 
deliberate the wisdom of its remaining sanctions. The nagging question 
that lingers in my mind is, Will the 47 ever see the light of day or 
will they be forcibly deported from their country and another 52 
arrested overnight to take their place?
  It is possible the regime will never release them because they do not 
want the world to see them because of the torture to which they have 
been subjected. Here is one of those prisoners. Last month, a man named 
Ariel Sigler was released from a Cuban prison on the verge of death. He 
was a 250-pound amateur boxer. You see him there in great health. This 
is the picture of his release--a 100-pound paraplegic. A 100-pound 
paraplegic. He did nothing to deserve that set of consequences.
  Last month, the regime once again refused to let the United Nations 
Special Rapporteur on Torture visit the island, which, in my own view, 
speaks volumes about the conditions of the thousands of Cubans who have 
been imprisoned.
  When you oppose the Castro regime, you are called dangerous, and 
there is a charge of dangerousness. Thousands of Cubans have been sent 
to Castro's prisons because of dangerousness. That is dangerousness: 
simply opposing the regime and seeking change in your home country--and 
for other trumped-up political charges.
  If that is what is happening to the 200 internationally recognized 
and known political prisoners, then how much worse must it be for the 
thousands of anonymous political prisoners who have not been reported 
because they fall under the charge of dangerousness?
  According to the State Department:

       The total number of detainees is unknown because the 
     government does not disclose such information and keeps its 
     prisons off limits to human rights organizations and 
     international human rights monitors.

  Again according to the State Department:

       One human rights organization lists more than 200 political 
     prisoners currently detained in Cuba in addition to as many 
     as 5,000 people sentenced for dangerousness.

  Yet, in the face of this repression, some Members want to provide the 
Castro regime with its No. 1 source of income: tourism. This is not 
about travel; this is about rewarding a repressive regime. We already 
have hundreds of thousands of Americans who travel to Cuba for family, 
education, or humanitarian reasons under our existing law. But tourism 
to Cuba is a natural resource, akin to providing refined petroleum 
products to a country such as Iran. It is reported that 2.5 million

[[Page S5950]]

tourists visit Cuba each year--1.5 million from North America, 1 
million Canadians; more than 170,000 from England; more than 400,000 
from Spain, Italy, Germany, and France combined; all bringing in nearly 
$2 billion in revenue to the Castro regime.
  Yet nothing has changed in Cuba except the amount of tourism dollars 
the regime has at its disposal. What does it do with nearly $2 billion 
of resources from tourism? Does it put more food on the plates of Cuban 
families? Does it create a better quality of life for the Cuban people? 
No. Even with all of that money coming in, the Castro regime still 
rations people's food. They have to stand in line with a coupon to get 
access to a simple meal, waiting in long lines for a subsistence meal. 
Of course, when the regime rations people and they are in line just 
trying to get a meal for the day, there is no time for promoting 
democracy or human rights. The people are just trying to exist, trying 
to keep their family fed. There is no time but to stand in line, 
despite several billions of dollars to the Castro regime from tourism.
  To me, that is an irreversible concession to a regime that this week 
arrested a Cuban American for providing laser printers and ink 
cartridges to a rural woman's opposition movement in Santiago. He was 
interrogated, the head of the movement's home raided by a dozen state 
security agents, the printer and cartridges confiscated. What a threat, 
a bunch of printers and ink cartridges. What a threat. He was 
subsequently released and put on a plane back. Meanwhile, an American 
remains in prison for helping the island's Jewish community connect to 
the Internet. After 6 months in jail, this individual still faces no 
trial and no charges, a U.S. citizen, jailed simply because he was 
trying to help the Jewish community in Havana to access the Internet. 
What a crime. What a crime. Yet for the most part we are relatively 
silent.
  They were looking to help the Cuban people. But the regime doesn't 
want anyone engaging with the Cuban people. They want tourists to 
provide only one thing--hard currency, dollars, money.
  Visiting the beaches of Varadero and sipping a Cuba libre, which is 
an oxymoron, provides money to continue repression, but it will not let 
the Cuban people sip the sweetness of freedom. It will not change the 
plight of the Women in White. These are women who are the mothers, 
daughters, sisters, and wives of those many political prisoners in 
Castro's jails who each week, normally on Sunday, march dressed in 
white in peaceful protest with a gladiola and, in doing so, are 
ultimately trying to say: Free my relative.
  This photograph shows the consequence of what they face. State 
security, dressed up as civilians, ultimately, as we can see, 
assaulting them, hurting them, arresting them. It will not change the 
fate of the Women in White, and it will not change the fate of their 
family member who remains jailed.
  It will not change the fate of being imprisoned by the regime and 
then being released, as they have done so many times when there is some 
international spotlight on an individual, only to be rearrested over 
and over and over.
  It will not change the tragic fate of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who was 
deemed a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, who died in 
February after being on a hunger strike in a Cuban prison for 85 days 
protesting horrific prison conditions. It will not end the desire for 
freedom or change conditions in Cuba for men like Guillermo Farinas who 
began his hunger strike after the death of Zapata, ending it after he 
heard of the prisoner release, but vowing that he and other courageous 
Cubans would join in yet another hunger strike, if the 52 other 
political prisoners are not released and put back in their homes by 
November 7.
  This photograph shows what he has been emaciated to in his hunger 
strike.
  Lifting the travel ban, allowing tourist dollars to flow to the 
regime will not end any of it. It will not free the people of Cuba. It 
will not change the fate of the Women in White or the desire for 
freedom of Guillermo Farinas and the other political prisoners. It will 
only enrich the regime.
  Reports this week have pointed out the economic impact opening travel 
to Cuba will cause to the Gulf States, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, 
and other democratic neighbors in the Caribbean. The dollars that will 
be transferred from those tourism economies should be for the benefit 
of a democratic government in a free Cuba not to bail out a brutal 
regime. The Castros don't deserve it, and the U.S. Gulf States and our 
Caribbean friends cannot afford it.
  According to the Jamaica Daily Gleaner:

       The results of various studies of the likely impact on the 
     Caribbean of lifting of the U.S. travel ban suggests that 
     Cuba's tourism arrival would surge to full capacity at the 
     expense of other Caribbean destinations . . .
       . . . Apart from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, 
     the most heavily dependent Caribbean destinations on the U.S. 
     and the most vulnerable, should the legislation to lift the 
     travel ban pass, ultimately include [many of the islands in 
     the Caribbean that would have an enormous economic damage to 
     them].

  It seems to me we should be promoting tourism to the beaches along 
the gulf coast, not to the apartheid beaches of Castro's Cuba.
  You are not even allowed, as a Cuban citizen, to go to the beaches, 
many of the beaches of your own homeland, because they are reserved for 
tourists. You can't enter some of the hotels unless a tourist in your 
own country brings you in. That is why we call it apartheid. You cannot 
have access in your own homeland.
  Imagine in my home State of New Jersey, where we love the New Jersey 
shore, imagine me not being able to go to any of the beaches in New 
Jersey because the government wants to restrict me from interacting 
with tourists and that those beaches would be reserved only for foreign 
tourists in my own home State in my own home country. That is what goes 
on.
  Allowing the regime to benefit from increased tourism will not change 
a thing in Cuba. It will not bring democracy to Cuba. It will not make 
conditions for the Cuban people any better or change the history of the 
brutality of the Castro regime, a brutality that continues to this day. 
Sometimes I think some of my colleagues just don't have a sense. This 
is not using the word ``brutality'' for the sake of it. The pictures 
speak a thousand words.
  I would like my friends in the Senate and others beyond, who may not 
have fully engaged in understanding what this brutality is all about, 
to recall the words of Armando Valladeres who wrote the prize-winning 
book ``Against All Hope.'' He was imprisoned in the infamous Isla de 
Pinos in 1960 for his opposition to communism. He lived through the 
hell of Castro's jail, suffering violence, forced labor, and solitary 
confinement. His writings were smuggled out of Cuba, read throughout 
the world. He was finally released after intense international 
pressure, 22 years after he was taken prisoner. They had to 
rehabilitate him because they didn't want him released and shown to the 
world in the circumstances that some of these prisoners are.
  Here are some of his memories of activity at the hands of the Castro 
brothers while in captivity:

       I recalled the two sergeants, Porfirio and Matanzas, 
     plunging their bayonets into Ernesto Diaz Madruga's body. . . 
     . Boitel, denied water, after more than fifty days on a 
     hunger strike, because Castro wanted him dead; Clara, 
     Boitel's poor mother, beaten by Lieutenant Abad in a 
     Political Police station just because she wanted to find out 
     where her son was buried. . . . Officers . . . threatened 
     family members if they cried at a funeral.
       I remember Estebita and Piri dying in blackout cells, the 
     victims of biological experimentation. . . . So many others 
     murdered in the forced-labor fields, quarries and camps. A 
     legion of specters, naked, crippled, hobbling and crawling 
     through my mind, and the hundreds of men mutilated in the 
     horriffing searches.
       Eduardo Capote's fingers chopped off by a machete. 
     Concentration camps, tortures, women beaten. . . .
       And in the midst of that apocalyptic vision of the most 
     dreadful and horrifying moments in my life, in the midst of 
     the gray, ashy dust and the orgy of beatings and blood, 
     prisoners beaten to the ground, a man 
     emerged. . . .
       . . . the skeletal figure of a man wasted by hunger with 
     white hair, blazing blue eyes, and a heart overflowing with 
     love, raising his arms to the invisible heaven and pleading 
     for mercy for his executioners.
       ``Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.'' 
     And a burst of machine-gun fire ripping open his chest.

  I hope my colleagues remember these memories of Armando Valladeres 
and

[[Page S5951]]

the realities of Castro's prisons before we think about rewarding the 
Castro regime in any way. Their sins are too great, and this is not a 
thing of the past. Their brutality and repression have been going on 
since the inception and still go on today. It has never stopped. It has 
never gotten better. It has never changed. It never will for so long as 
the regime is in power.
  When I hear my colleagues come to the floor and talk about lifting 
the travel ban, I am compelled to ask, Why is there such an obvious 
double standard when it comes to Cuba? Why are the gulags of Cuba so 
different than the gulags of other places in the world? Why are we 
willing to tighten sanctions against some but loosen them when it comes 
to an equally repressive regime in Cuba, in effect rewarding them? Why 
are we so willing to throw up our hands and say: It is time to forget?
  I don't believe it is time to forget. We can never forget those who 
have suffered and died at the hands of dictators anywhere, and 
certainly not in Cuba. It is clear the repression in Cuba continues 
unabated, notwithstanding the embargo, notwithstanding calls by those 
who want us to ease travel restrictions, ease sanctions, 
notwithstanding the fact that we have millions of visitors from other 
places in the world bringing billions of dollars, and still the 
repression goes on. In good conscience, I cannot do that. I will not 
step back.
  I have come to the floor in the past to oppose any attempt to do 
that, to pass any bill that in essence lifts the travel ban on Cuba. I 
will continue to do so. I will continue to do so until we have the 
opportunity to make sure the Cuban people are ultimately free, make 
sure they have the basic fundamental rights that you and I enjoy in 
this great country, and to ensure the voices of all who languish in 
Castro's jails--for which the world seems to be deaf to their cries, 
does not seem to care, does not speak about, does not do anything 
about--will continue to raise their voices in this Chamber and beyond.
  I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Udall of Colorado). Without objection, it 
is so ordered.

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