Ros-Lehtinen's Duplicitous Attack on Purposeful Travel

http://thehavananote.com/2011/07/ros_lehtinens_duplicitous_attack_purposeful_travel

excerpt:

Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is seeking to use a politically biased evaluation system of sex-trafficking to pressure the Administration to retreat from its important, albeit bureaucratically constipated, opening of purposeful travel.

Ros-Lehtinen wrote Secretary of State Clinton, no doubt seeking to appeal to her well known concern for a pervasive international problem:

I would urge the administration, within all applicable rules and guidelines, to reverse its current policy and suspend all educational and cultural exchanges with the Cuban regime pursuant to the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.

According to U.S. law, “countries on Tier 3 may not receive funding for government employees’ participation in educational and cultural exchange programs.”

The substance of Cuba’s ranking in the trafficking score card is about as real, and is as politically motivated, as the justification for keeping Cuba on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. From the State Department report:

Cuba is a source country for adults and some children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking. Some Cuban medical professionals assigned to work abroad have claimed that their passports were retained as a means of keeping them in a state of exploitation, thus preventing them from traveling freely.* … The scope of trafficking within Cuba is particularly difficult to gauge due to the closed nature of the government and sparse non-governmental or independent reporting…..

neither asking for nor accepting permission to go to Cuba.
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