Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Ohio Congresswoman Marcia Fudge, have been taking it on the chin in some quarters for a fact-finding trip to Havana, Cuba, to meet with that nation's president. Since the Kennedy administration in the 1960s in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tiny island 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. has been embargoed and isolated.
An editorial asserts that petty politics and diplomatic one-upmanship should not play a part in a stated request by Dr Juan Carrizo Estevez, the director of Cuba's two-year-old Latin American School of Medical Sciences, to obtain a visa to the US to meet with black college officials and the Congressional Black Caucus to discuss a grandiose, gratuitous offer from Cuba of a free medical education to US students.
-, An editorial asserts that the Chicago Defender joins the Congressional Black Caucus, the Miami Branch of the NAACP and Rep Carrie Meek in denouncing a Bush administration directive requiring INS officials to arbitrarily detain Haitian refugees seeking asylum in the US.
