Bolivian leader pays surprise visit to Castro

[Judi Lynn]

Bolivian leader pays surprise visit to Castro
Wed Sep 6, 2006 8:08pm ET

HAVANA (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales made a surprise half-day visit to Cuba on Wednesday to visit convalescing Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Cuban television said.

Morales spent two hours with Castro, who is recovering from emergency surgery to stop intestinal bleeding which forced him to cede power temporarily to his younger brother on July 31.

He is the second leader to visit the bed-ridden Castro. Venezuela's left-wing president Hugo Chavez, Castro's closest ally, has visited him three times.

Morales, an indigenous leader who rose from Bolivia's coca farmers movement to the presidency, lunched with Raul Castro and met with Bolivians studying medicine in Cuba before departing for La Paz on Wednesday evening.
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http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-09-07T000844Z_01_N06176849_RTRUKOC_0_US-CUBA-CASTRO-BOLIVIA.xml&archived=False

[Say_What]

1. Remember Robert Torricelli? CANF bought and paid for pol

who lost his Senate seat because of corruption? Here's a great article by Jane Franklin about his fantasy trip to Cuba.

<clips>

By Jane Franklin

Poor Robert Torricelli. Four years after losing his senate seat because of corruption, he tries to invent a life in which he stars as a man of principle – the hero in a struggle to bring freedom to Cuba. In real life, Rep. Torricelli (D-NJ) took a trip to Cuba November 20-23, 1988. J. Scott Orr reported (Newark, NJ, Star-Ledger, November 24) that Torricelli talked with President Fidel Castro one night “from 8 p.m. until 2:30 a.m.” Orr noted that in “touring Cuba during the trip,” Torricelli found living conditions “quite good compared to other Latin American nations.” Torricelli said, “‘Living standards are not high, but the homelessness, hunger and disease that is witnessed in much of Latin America does not appear evident.’”

That trip was his one and only trip to Cuba.<1> But because it did not fit with his later career as a leader in waging political and economic warfare against Cuba, Torricelli tried to bury its memory. Now, in “How a few days changed my life -- and Castro’s” (Star-Ledger, August 6<2>), he has replaced that real trip with a fabricated trip to Cuba in 1992. During his real-life visit, the Soviet Union was still intact, but Torricelli has time-traveled into the future, after the Soviet Union’s collapse. “By the time I took my seat in the living quarters of the Cuban dictator,” he writes, the “collapse of Soviet communism severed the $6 billion Russian lifeline.” Torricelli has Castro discussing the fall of the Soviet Union and the overthrow of Romania’s government, which did not take place until 1989, a year after Torricelli’s actual meeting with Castro. Since the references would not have been made in 1988 and since Torricelli did not return to Cuba, this self-serving dialogue, like the whole 1992 visit, is impossible fantasy.

Torricelli next concocts an equally impossible return from the phony 1992 trip. He claims that a “few weeks” after his visit he “was having lunch in the main salon of a friend’s yacht in Coral Gables with leaders of the exile community.” At that luncheon, “We began drafting the Cuban Democracy Act.” But that’s not how it happened.

To understand what did happen, follow the money. In 1989, with favorable impressions from his recent trip to Cuba still on his mind, Torricelli favored efforts to lift the U.S. trade embargo against selling food and medicine to Cuba. He was concerned about the embargo’s effect on the people of Cuba.<3> Then the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the wealthiest and most influential of all the Cuban-American groups, began to pay special attention to Torricelli, contributing money and luxurious treats “amid the wealthy and elite of Miami’s Cuban community,” as he describes them in the article. He became bosom buddies with the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the multimillionaire chairman of CANF.

http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Jane_Franklin&otherweek=1157518800