PlayStations for Cuba!
Guardian (London) - November 16, 2006
Dissidents blew American ‘aid’ millions on luxuries for Cuba by Richard Luscombe
Cuban dissidents who were given millions of dollars by the US
government to support democracy in their homeland instead blew money
on computer games, cashmere sweaters, crabmeat and chocolates, which
were then sent to the island.
A scathing congressional audit of democracy assistance programmes
found “questionable expenditure” by several groups funded by
Washington in opposition to President Fidel Castro’s rule on the
communist Caribbean island.
The Miami-based Acción Democrática Cubana spent money on a chainsaw,
Nintendo Game Boys and Sony PlayStations, mountain bikes, leather
coats and Godiva chocolates, which the group says were all sent to
Cuba. “These people are going hungry. They never get any chocolate
there,” Juan Carlos Acosta, the group’s executive director, told the
Miami Herald. = He also defended the purchase of a chainsaw he said
he needed to cut a tree that had blocked access to his office in a
hurricane, and said the leather jackets and cashmere sweaters were
bought in a sale. “They [the auditors] think it’s not cold there,” Mr
Acosta said. “At $30 [£16] it’s a bargain because cashmere is
expensive. They were asking for sweaters.”
The audit analysed $65m of spending by the US Agency for
International Development (USAid) from 1996 to 2005 and concluded
that poor management was to blame for the waste. “There were
weaknesses in agency policies and in programme office oversight, and
internal control deficiencies,” the report states.
None of the 36 groups that received money were identified in the
report, but others admitted to the Miami Herald in advance of its
publication on Wednesday that they had been investigated.
Frank Hernández-Trujillo, executive director of Grupo de Apoyo a la
Democracia (Group for the Support of Democracy), said his
organisation received more than $7m from USAid, a programme that has
been a central part of President George Bush’s policy on Cuba.
“I’ll defend that until I die,” Mr Hernández-Trujillo said of his
decision to spend part of his group’s allocation on boxes of computer
games. “That’s part of our job, to show the people in Cuba what they
could attain if they were not under that system.”
Most of the items were distributed to dissidents in Cuba by US
diplomats in Havana, who were sometimes unaware what was in the
shipments. The US government, however, has previously accused the
Cuban government of hijacking consignments sent to its mission.