No surprise with new Human Rights Watch report

No one should be surprised by this report. Did we really need a 123 page report to tell us what we already knew? Nothing has changed under Raul Castro. Living in South Florida as we do we are constantly hearing of desperate Cubans in rickety, decrepit rafts braving the 90 mile shark-infested stretch between their island and Florida trying to reach this shore and the freedom it represents. Raul Castro's regime is simply more of the same Fidel's Cuba.

A political science professor of mine in college once said to understand whether a nation has problems you apply a simple "gate test." If more people are trying to go out the gate of a country to leave it than are trying to get in through the gate, then that nation has problems. This is the case with Cuba. The island is a repressive country where basic human rights are violated every day. People are poor, hungry and desperate to get out.

At Guantanamo there is a monument where some of the most ramshackle rafts which Cubans tried to sail to freedom are kept in their original state, depicting the desperation of the Cuban people. I am still searching for a similar monument in the U.S. for the inverse, Americans desperate to reach Cuba to revel in its socialist glory. There is no such monument. The "gate test" remains intact.