Same old, Same old

Please read the following report:

PARIS, Oct 11 (AFP) - France's foreign minister told his Cuban counterpart during a meeting here on Tuesday that Cuba must release its political prisoners.

"The meeting was exclusively about the human rights situation in Cuba," said a French foreign ministry statement.

"The minister (Philippe Douste-Blazy) reiterated our position and demanded the release of political prisoners in Cuba," it said.

There are 336 political prisoners in Cuba, according to the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), which is banned by Havana's communist regime.

The Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, for his part "repeated his government's traditional position on this point," the statement said, adding that the two ministers "noted their disagreement."

The European Union sanctioned Cuba in 2003 after the regime arrested 75 dissidents in a crackdown in May of that year, but Brussels temporarily suspended the penalties this year and re-established political dialogue with Havana.

The CCDHRN says 30 dissidents have been arrested in Cuba since July in what it calls "a new wave of repression."

Cuba has defied over 40 years of US sanctions aimed at ousting President Fidel Castro, who runs the one-party state by controlling most aspects of Cuban life through the communist party.

I want all of the people who have been insisting for the past 10 years that what is needed is a dialogue with Cuba to tell me how this could be considered progress. They use the same tired argument that the embargo hasn't worked (even though no country has ever joined us in an effort to make it work). Yet every other country in the world, of consequence, has diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba and it is still the gulag it has been for 46 years. How have the hotels and thetourism helped liberate the Cuban people?

I'm glad that the French putz and the Cuban putz can agree to disagree. Meanwhile in Cuba you go to jail just for having a difference of opinion. I renew my call to Europe's leaders to grow a pair of gonads, stand up to their countrymen that are profiting from the misery of the cuban people, and isolate fidel castro. I call on Americans to contact the President at president@whitehouse.gov so that he can make this a priority in our foreign policy toward our "allies". It's time to pick up the big stick again.