Political Quotes

“Thank you very much, my dear colleague from California and our distinguished Member of Congress, Barbara Lee. And I can't think of any other Member who has made more trips and taken more people and influenced this change of policy in the United States Congress than Barbara Lee. I have had the pleasure of traveling to Cuba on six different mission trips and each one of them has been very interesting, one with my constituents in Santa Cruz, California, who have a sister city relationship with an area called Guama, and it looks much like the California coastline, and a very interesting area of trying to help rural people with a better connection by learning about their rural delivery of medicine, which far exceeds the way we treat rural people in this country, and learning from them how we might be doing a better job, at the same time improving the facilities they have, and things like that, just a cultural exchange. I find that every time I am there, whether it is Havana or other parts of Cuba, that there is always kind of a curiosity of learning about another country, a very well-educated country, a sophisticated country, yet a very, very poor country. I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Latin America, in Colombia. I lived in barrios without water and without lights. People in Cuba might have access to water and lights, but the living conditions that they live in are really restricted, and some of the conditions in Havana are the greatest poverty I have seen in the world.…”