Word: cuba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...truly free educational system should operate unconditionally. But in Cuba, your education comes at a severe price: forced labor in escuelas del campo (countryside schools), to which junior high students are sent for work ranging from picking tomatoes to cutting sugar cane. Entrance into Cuba’s universities is conditional on involvement with the Communist Party. Cuban students cannot express dissenting opinions for fear of being identified as “counter-revolutionaries,” effectively precluding them from pursuing professional careers...
...qualify the repressive nature of the regime with praise of those supposed advances in medicine and education is unacceptable. Anything that falls short of a free society leaves all other considerations insignificant. It is hard to imagine that 90 miles from our shore, freedoms are alienable. In Cuba, the choice to dissent from the government has dire ramifications. Citizens are imprisoned for merely voicing an opinion. Prisoners of conscience are systematically tortured and often executed for not conforming to the constraints of the totalitarian state—just some of many blatant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...
...With great hope, we look forward to the day when Cuba can promise liberty to all its citizens. To a day when we could publish a critical article of this nature without having to fear the retribution of the government. Castro’s resignation is symbolic and significant in its own context, but unfortunately, it won’t mark the start of a new era in Cuban history...
...scholars of the presidency, Kennedy's failure to scuttle or fix the ill-conceived invasion of Cuba is a classic case of the insufficiency of charisma alone. No quips, grins or flights of rhetoric would do. Kennedy needed on-the-job training, as he later admitted to a friend: "Presumably, I was going to learn these lessons sometime, and maybe better sooner than later." Unfortunately, when a President gets an education, we all pay the tuition...
...experience takes on added bite this year, though, because the next President will inherit a troubled and menacing satchel of problems. From the Iraq tightrope to the stumbling economy, from the China challenge to the health-care mess, from loose nukes to oil dependence to (some things never change) Cuba policy - the next President will be tossed a couple dozen flaming torches at the end of the inaugural parade, and it would be helpful to know that this person has juggled before...