The State Department has granted Mariela Castro — daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro — permission to come to the Bay.
Since the Cold War, relations between the United States and Cuba have never been particularly rosy.
Even now, a half a century after the Bay of Pigs debacle took the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, there’s a lot of tension between the two governments.
Case in point: Mariela Castro, daughter of Cuban President Raul Castro, has been granted a visa to attend the Latin American Studies Association 2012 conference in San Francisco next week.
A number of U.S. politicians are railing against the idea, claiming she represents communism and that she’s “an opponent of democracy.”
The greatest complaints are coming from Cuban-Americans, many of whom have family who fled Cuba to escape the Communist regime.
Another issue is that these kinds of visitor visas aren’t supposed to be issued to officers or employees of a government. The Secretary of State, however, has the power to make exemptions.
Mariela Castro has visited the U.S. before, as have a number of other prominent Cubans connected to the Castro government.
Besides, the aim of Castro’s trip is to promote sexual diversity, namely, the legalization of same-sex marriage, a cause she’s promoted heavily in Cuba as the head of the country’s National Center for Sex Education.
Perhaps people should focus on her work and her message, not just what country she comes from. That’s just a way of trying to divide us even further as a human race, in my opinion, and we shouldn’t stand for it.
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