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Cuba Caravan Program in Brookings Friday

Let's go to Cuba! Brookings Pax Christi is hosting a potluck and program to support the "Caravan to Cuba" project. For 25 years, Pastors for Peace has been organizing relief trips to Cuba to protest the anti-Castro embargo the United States has imposed on the island for over 50 years. Brookings Pax Christi's potluck begins at 6 p.m. Friday, July 11th, at the United Church of Christ, 828 8th Street South, in Brookings. The program begins at 6:45 p.m. For more information, call Andrew L'Amour at 692-4386.

Pastors for Peace justifies its humanitarian protest thus:

“The blockade is a byzantine maze of US Cold War-era policies aimed at destabilizing our neighbors in Cuba -- from the ban on commercial transactions, which still stifles Cuba’s ability to get basic medicines to the travel ban which separates families, to putting Cuba on the list of state-sponsors of terrorism, which is absolutely absurd,” said Gail Walker, Co-Director of IFCO/Pastors for Peace. “How can we label a country which sends doctors and teachers around the world and trains thousands of young people to become doctors for the poor as terrorist?” [IFCO/Pastors for Peace, "Cuba Caravan Kicks Off July 8th," press release, 2014.07.07]

I can understand the urge to have nothing to do with unsavory characters like the Castros and Che Guevara. But fifty-plus years of not interacting with Cuba hasn't toppled Castro regime; it's just made Cubans experts at antique auto maintenance and urban farming. What practical harm lies in following Pastors for Peace and opening the doors to Cuban trade and immigration?

8 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2014.07.09

    Curious how the Castros and Guevara are any more unsavory than Harry Truman or LBJ.

  2. larry kurtz 2014.07.09

    That christians are being allowed to infiltrate the Cuban culture is outrageous on its face.

  3. wal 2014.07.09

    didn't a bunch of folks go to Cuba years ago? Bollen, Sveen etc. They came back "optimistic" that significant contracts would be signed in the next 12 months. Wonder who paid for that trip?

  4. mike from iowa 2014.07.09

    I can't imagine the Castro family being much worse than the Bush clan or other American so called dynasties.

  5. Roger Cornelius 2014.07.09

    Send Sibby down there to build a chapel.

  6. Steve Sibson 2014.07.09

    Larry, which Christians are infiltrating, the Biblical ones or the apostate ones?

  7. larry kurtz 2014.07.09

    christians slaughtered 52 million (52,000,000) indigenous, sib.

  8. Deb Geelsdottir 2014.07.09

    I think the biggest obstacle is the Cuban expatriates anti Castro voters in Florida. Politicians want to stay on the good side of all those Florida votes.

Comments are closed.