Congresswoman Kathy Castor Should Stop Supporting Castros

Capitol Hill Cubans

By former New York Times reporter and Miami Herald editor, Angel Castillo Jr., in Florida Voices:

Castor Should Stop Supporting Castro Brothers

In the dying days of their failed communist revolution, Cuba’s Castro brothers, “President” Raul and dictator emeritus Fidel, have added a very useful Washington lobbyist to their roster of U.S. based propagandists.

She is Congresswoman Kathy Castor, a left-wing member of the Democratic Party from Tampa who, since 2007, represents the Tampa and St. Petersburg metropolitan areas. She believes that since 1959 the Castro brothers have merely conducted “an amazing experiment in communism that did not work” on the island.

For some time now, Castor, a 46-year-old lawyer, has been advocating on behalf of the termination of the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, the No. 1 priority of the Castros. Of course, the embargo has long been a joke, with Cuba buying food and medicine directly from the U.S., and other goods indirectly through multiple corporations based in Panama and other opaque corporate havens.

Not only does Castor want the embargo to end, she also is advocating on behalf of other urgent Castro goals: remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism, increase commerce between Cuba and the U.S., and remove restrictions that keep American tourists from traveling freely to Cuba to spend Yankee dollars there.

Castor, however, does not call for Cuba to do anything at all in return for all the financial concessions that she wants the American taxpayers to generously lavish on the octogenarian oppressors of the Cuban people.

While she may not be required legally to register as a lobbyist for Cuba under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, Castor has certainly been acting like one, urging President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry, among others, to make life easier for the Castros.

She also has been working hand in glove with several notorious pro-Castro U.S. propaganda organizations to promote the agenda of the Cuban government in this country. These include the Center for Democracy in the Americas, the Center for International Policy, and the Alliance for Responsible Cuba Policy Foundation

Castor was a keynote speaker last month at a two-day Tampa conference titled “Rapprochement With Cuba: Good for Tampa, Good for Florida, Good for America,” during which she vigorously called for an immediate end to all U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba.

Among those participating with Castor at the conference were Castro diplomats Llanio Gonzalez Lopez, General Counselor of Cuba in the U.S., and Warnel Lores Mora, Counselor and First Secretary, both with the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.

Last week, while Beyonce and Jay-Z were happily traipsing through tourist Havana as part of an “educational exchange trip,” Castor arrived in Cuba for a four-day “fact finding mission” ostensibly aimed at creating “business jobs in the Tampa area”.

No sooner did Castor return to Tampa than she hurried to meet with the local news media, including the editorial board of the Tampa Tribune newspaper, to preach about ending the embargo. After listening to Castor, the Tribune dutifully published an editorial calling for an end to the embargo.

Let’s hope all those rich Cuban tourists jam Tampa Bay’s hotels and beaches real soon and help create thousands of good business jobs there.