Was going to say the same thing. For a while I did read that US citizens were able to circumvent the travel ban and catch connecting flights to Cuba while either in Honduras, Mexico or some the other Central American counties that had ties and travel routes to Cuba. If I remember the scam/method was to grant a temporary visa to any US travelers for a price. And the reports news items these people wrote about when they got back to the states confirmed Cuban authorities allowed travel to only those sections that were "proper examples of life under socialism" Read that as being similar to say Detroit only allowing reporters to spend time in the upscale and maintained sections of Detroit, and not the crumbling middle class neighborhoods being abandoned after the auto factories where the family breadwinners closed.
I grew up in Miami in the sixties. And of course knew and spent time with a lot of refugee children and their families. They made makeshift rafts to escape Castro and his goons. Oh yeah and if they were caught by the Cuban Coast Guard or Navy they were just as likely to spend a life sentence in a "workers camp, or if a repeat offender shot. The glorification of the murderous state police and Castro by the leftist in this country is completely outrageous. To hear how they glorify Castro and his regime is about what they are doing for the groups in charge of Venezuela now. I knew of several families who lost family members to late night raids based on "reports of hoarding and spreading of capitalist propaganda " by the arrested and convicted,(then shot by firing squad), convicts as a lesson to any others that dared defy the Castro government. There may have been some improvement since the mid sixties and early seventies. Enough people die or flee and the need for food and other goods is reduced. Cuba was also propped up by the old Soviet Union as a slap in the face to the US during the later stages of the cold war.
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