My name is Daniel. I was an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and am now a writer who has

published three books including South Korea: Our Story by Daniel Nardini.

                            One of the saddest facts of life is that that the American political left, like

the Korean political left, tries to hold up Communist one-party tyrannies as "great" examples of

the best of humanity. The Korean political left does this with North Korea, and the American

political left does this with Cuba. I have been to Cuba, and there is no paradise. One of the first

things I saw was that all publications were government-run and had only news and stories carefully

chosen by the Cuban government. There were NO independent, no private newspapers or magazines.

Another thing I noticed that could not be disputed was the immense poverty. Whole sections of

Old Havana's historical section was falling apart, and if a Cuban got sick then they could look

forward to no medicines in their state-run clinics and hospitals. This I know because some

Americans who were with us needed medical care for eye infections and they commented that

there was no medicine available in the clinics they went to. Only the clinics for Cuban government

officials and Communist Party members had the medicines they needed, but the Americans had

to pay a lot of money for such treatment. Cuban agriculture was such a joke that people in the

fields we saw were harvesting everything by hand because all machinery, such it was, had broken

down due to government neglect. This is why the government has allowed private agricultural

production. Freedom of religion was only allowed into Cuba in 1991, and even then it is still

very limited. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom to protest, no freedom to change one's

residence (without special permission from the Communist Party, and in too many ways no

freedom to leave the country. The Cuban government claim of free healthcare and 100 percent

literacy has no meaning when there is barely any heath care at all and people can only read

what the government puts out. And everyone has to live in fear of the government if they say

something wrong. If Cuba is such a wonderful showpiece of socialism, then North Korea is

just as equally bad if not worse, and I see no justice of these two tyrannies being held up as

the best examples of humanity by leftist fools who really do not understand reality.