>>I seriously doubt that even a smidge of the Cubans who try to make landfall in the U.S. have their life threatened by the regime. I bet they want to go to the U.S. for the same reasons Mexicans do - to earn a living towards a better life.
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>I was thinking the same thing, but wasn't sure. I'm not crazy about that either then, but there are many millions less of the Cubans and they tend to stay in Florida, which I don't like anyway. It is interesting that we call the cubans "refugees" and the Mexicans "illegals." The more I think about it, the less I'm liking the whole Cuban thing. Thanks for that Jim! <g>

That's the part of being a thoroughly capitalistic country - you trust the system so much that you don't even shop around learning about other possibilities (don't even have a chance to), so you just blindly trust whatever your gov't says about other systems. Since this mantra (capitalism good, socialism bad) is taken as an axiom, everything else follows: any scum who claims to have been persecuted by a socialist gov't is not a simple refugee, they get a political asylum. Their government, when asked, may have produced their criminal record, but can we trust a socialist gov't? Nah, if we trusted them on this one, we may start trusting them in other cases, and we know it's impossible to achieve what they claim they did, so it's safer to just not trust them. Etc etc. So you get what you get, USA helped Cuba get rid of its criminals, or who knows, maybe even planted spies, terrorists, anything.