Friday, June 13, 2008
"Not one of them is Cuban"
ABC News tonight had a story about rising starvation in Afghanistan. According to this article, the FAO has up to 18 million Afghans are "food insecure," and, as the article discusses anecdotally, this is leading not just to death by starvation but by suicide as well.
Which, in conjunction with the latest inane statements from Barack Obama, leads me to reprint something published here last year:
900 thousand children die every month because of poverty: not one of them is Cuban.Incidentally, if you substitute the word "American" for "Cuban" in those statements, it's no longer true.
200 million children in the world sleep on the streets today. None of them is Cuban.
250 million children under 13 have to work in order to survive. None of them is Cuban.
More than one million children are forced into prostitution and tens of thousands have been victims of human organ trafficking. None of them is Cuban.
25 thousand children in the world die every day of measles, malaria, diphtheria, pneumonia and malnutrition. None of them is Cuban.
No, I'm not under the impression that Cuba is a paradise on Earth. What I do know is that they're doing a heck of a lot better than most other nations on earth, and the reason they're being singled out by people like Barack Obama has nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged "tyranny," "darkness," and "terrible and tragic status quo" which Obama claims is found in Cuba. If he wants to find those things in the world, there are an awful lot of places which ought to demand his attention above Cuba. He might start with Washington, D.C., where the life expectancy is 72 years, on a par with the Gaza Strip and well below that of Cuba.
