Jeff Flake: “I just heard that those who support this amendment were silent when Castro jailed over 80 dissidents in Cuba just months…”

“I just heard that those who support this amendment were silent when Castro jailed over 80 dissidents in Cuba just months ago. I would remind the gentleman from New Jersey that the same individuals who are here in support of this amendment came to the floor and argued on behalf of the Diaz-Balart amendment condemning Castro for this action. So we have stood firm, the Cuba Working Group, and others who support this amendment against the atrocities that have happened there. I also wanted to respond to whether or not this is a good use of taxpayer dollars to actually use these dollars to enforce the travel ban as opposed to actually wage the war on terrorism. The Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Treasury Department currently spends between 10 and 20 percent of its resources actually enforcing the Cuba travel ban. This is the office charged with the task of tracking down al Qaeda money, to actually shutting down the international war on terrorism, the financial war; yet they are spending over 10 percent of its resources tracking down, in essence, grandmothers from Iowa who are going on a biking trip to Cuba or the gentleman from Washington who spent less than 24 hours in Cuba to scatter his parents' ashes at the churches they built in the 1950s.”