News > Politics > Iraqi Officials Secretly Attempted to Buy Cuban Hookers From Niger

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THURSDAY JULY 29 2004 9:06 AM

Iraqi Officials Secretly Attempted to Buy Cuban Hookers From Niger

Submitted by reprobate

Edited by legionnaire

In the wake of the "16 words" debacle arising from the 2003 State of the Union address, the Bush administration has decided to forego relying on forgeries and former Ba'athists for vital information and instead credit only reputable undergraduate term papers for justification of its foreign policy.

While the move was well received in a recent campaign pass through Florida timed to coincide with the administration's latest attempt to pander a margin of victory in that state from the most reactionary of its Cuban expatriate community, certain critics, including the paper's author, have taken issue with the fact that the quotation was never uttered by Castro and the paraphrase completely distorted both his actual remarks and the import of the thesis it was cribbed from.

"It shows that they didn't read much of the article," Trumbull said in a telephone interview.

According to Trumbull, who conducted field research in Cuba, prostitution boomed in the Caribbean nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, providing an important source of currency for the Cuban economy. Castro, who outlawed prostitution when he took power in 1959, initially had few resources to combat it. But beginning around 1996, Cuban authorities began to crack down on the practice.

Although prostitution still exists, Trumbull said, it is far less visible, and it would be inaccurate to say the government promotes it.

High level sources in the administration have said that while the new initiative has been successful, it is unlikely to be expanded as the new restrictions make it impossible for scholars to visit the island nation to do the administrations homework for them.

Comments

alpha_hazard

Fort Collins, CO

April 2004

JUL 29, 2004 09:39 AM

For just a second I mispronounced Niger...And that Headline took on a WHOLE deifferent meaning....

troglodyte

Victoria, BC

May 2003

JUL 29, 2004 09:51 AM

This part's just great:

"The president's point in citing Castro's quote was to highlight Castro's morally corrupt attitude to human trafficking," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said. She pointed to two other instances in which Castro boasted of the education level of Cuba's prostitutes; in neither case was the context a direct promotion of sex tourism.

First, I'd like to see what human trafficking they're referring to. Second, Castro routinely boasts about the education level in Cuba; his point here being, of course, that in Cuba even the hookers are educated. Third, do johns normally consider education as criterea in their choice of hookers? Fourth, the Cuban government goes out of its way to make sure that foreigners see and do only what the government wants themto see and do--it's technically illegal for Cubans to even talk to foreigners, let alone fuck them.