The Longest Romance

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Book: Read The Longest Romance for Free Online
Authors: Humberto Fontova
Ivette Molina who arrived horribly sunburnt, delirious and dehydrated. She had several bullet wounds and was also pregnant. Why does the world ignore this? I still wake up often in the middle of the night and find it impossible to sleep.
    â€œThat cemetery-without-crosses as we started calling it is a huge one. And this holocaust is still being denied—not by a few nutcases as in the one during WWII, but by most of the world.” 6
    Landfall itself doesn’t always ensure survival. On May 15, 1997 a Brothers to the Rescue flight-crew noticed people waving frantically from tiny key called Dog Rock in the southernmost Bahamas. Following their standard rescue pattern, the crew banked, came in on a lower pass and dropped water, food and a radio.
    In minutes the plane’s radio crackled with the news from below that the family of six rafters had languished on that blazing rock for 17 days. Three of them were still alive. The Brothers notified the Bahamian Coast Guard which arrived on a windless day
to find a dreadful stench hovering over the little rock island. Two of the freedom-seekers had perished days before and been crudely buried under rocks, the only burial possible. One was a four-year-old moppet named Camila Martinez Rodriguez, the other a 13-year-old girl named Adianet Tamayo Rodriguez. The captain of the tiny raft, 26-year-old Leonin Rivas, had also perished. The Cuban American National Foundation recovered the bodies and gave them a proper burial in Miami. The three survivors were granted asylum in the U.S.
    â€œMultiply that horror hundreds of times,” says Arturo Cobo, “and you’ll get an idea of what many of us witnessed from Key West during the 90’s. And it’s still going on today, though mercifully more infrequently.”
    During the first five months of 2012 the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted close to one thousand Cubans at sea. These were all shuttled back to Cuba, as mandated by U.S. law.

CASTRO’S WALL
    â€œMr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Who can forget the famous line? In fact most people forgot it shortly after President Reagan detonated the words at the Brandenberg Gate in June 1987. At the time they got little press-play, and what they got was mostly negative. President Reagan’s own advisors, Colin Powell and Howard Baker, denounced as “unpresidential” and “extremist” the proclamation that would become President Reagan’s most admired and famous.
    It was only in November 1989, as the wall was finally torn down, that Reagan’s proclamation was recalled, dusted off, and festooned with the fame now almost universal—at least among conservatives.
    The people of the Free World were thrilled en masse when the wall finally came down. To lay eyes on the Berlin Wall provoked
shame and horror. Here was stark and perfect proof of what divided the world. No amount of paint or plaster to pretty it up could disguise what it was doing. Reagan saw it and outspokenly called it by its name-diplomatic peck-sniffs be damned.
    And two years later Mr. Gorbachev complied, to much acclaim worldwide, though his compliance may have been unwitting.
    Down in Cuba at this very time, Raul Castro was warning: “If any Gorbachev raises his head around here, we’ll promptly chop it off! We would rather see Cuba sink into the ocean, like Atlantis, before we see the corrupting forces of capitalism prevail!” 7 Raul Castro’s boasts came safely from behind a Communist barrier that had murdered (by the lowest estimate) more than 20 times the number of innocents as the one Gorbachev had been petitioned to tear down.
    At the time of Raul Castro’s characteristically bloodthirsty boast and during the wholesale murder by his military of hundreds of Cubans for the crime of voting with their feet (and paddles) against him, thousands of tourists from Western Europe, including many from West Germany, were already pouring into Castro’s

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