Ileana Ros-Lehtinen: “This amendment ensures U.S. Government financing to the Castro regime. Our U.S. taxpayers would be subsidizing a…”

“This amendment ensures U.S. Government financing to the Castro regime. Our U.S. taxpayers would be subsidizing a dictatorship. Our country was founded on the principles of freedom, of democracy, of human rights. As the leader of the international community, this amendment means that our principles are being sacrificed. It means that we are no longer upholding, defending and, indeed, demonstrating the moral guidelines which have directed U.S. policy of helping oppressed people. This amendment would provide funds to a regime which violates human rights, which denies its citizens the right to participate in their religious beliefs. It tortures men and women for thinking differently and for voicing their dissenting opinions despite the threat to their personal safety. The safeguards that this amendment seeks to remove are in place so that the Castro regime does not take U.S. food and medicine and then sells it to a third country so that it can further increase its war chest, a war chest which it uses to torture, to harass, to intimidate and to oppress the Cuban people. This amendment would allow the unbridled, unrestricted trade with a brutal dictatorship using U.S. taxpayer funds, and it would only prolong the suffering of the Cuban people.”