Talking of Cuba, on one of my early trips to Spain I was staying in a town called Banyeres, which is pretty much the arsehole of the universe. The town had about 50 bars, 49 of which were never open and the remaining one was owned by a guy who was rude and unpleasant even by Spanish standards. One night in there a regular customer started talking to me and it took me a while to realise he was actually speaking in English, his accent was so heavy. I was initially trying to talk to him in Spanish.
Turned out he was actually an American citizen from Florida but Cuban by birth and escaped to the US with his family when he was a teenager. He was working for a US company in Spain.
Outstanding guy, he told me a lot of stuff about Cuba that never gets into the mainstream media.
I have been struggling to convince my missis about moving to the USA. There are a lot of reasons for this. One is that she comes from a close family and doesn't want to be too far away from them, ( which is fair enough. I don't have any family - at least not any that I like, all the good ones are dead )
The other reason is the European medias anti-Americanism. It's a steady, unrelenting drip drip drip of disinformation. It's good enough to take in otherwise sensible people like her.
For example, while I was away in Spain last she made a new friend, a horsey type, like her.
Her new friends mother lives in the USA and the friend ( who I will call 'Lurch' from now on, because that's what she looks like ) was trying to frighten her about healthcare in the US.
Lurch said she broke her arm once while visiting her mother in the US and the medical bill came to several thousand dollars. I asked Lurch if she had taken out travel insurance. Guess what the answer was ?
Then Lurch said that her mother was suffering from cancer and was worried about her medical insurance running out. I asked how long her mother had been ill and she replied 15 years - the cancer started in her ovaries and she had been in and out of remission ever since. I was gobsmacked. Ovarian cancer in the UK ? 6 months to two years and then you are toast. Our socialised NHS has a piss-poor record on treating cancer but I never realised it was that bad, so I pointed that out to Lurch.
Finally Lurch swapped track and started into how you can't really be free in the US because it's controlled by the Illuminati and the International Bankers. I took a chance and said ( as if I agreed with her ) " You really mean the Jews, don't you ? " - to which she replied " Yes "
And that was the end of that
No unpleasantness needed, I coaxed out of her what she really thought and therefore got rid of her poisonous influence without having to stick her arm up her back and throw her bodily out of my house - what Lurch didn't know is that my missis is a Christian from an evangelical background which has no truck whatsoever with anti-semitism. Hell, she's got a Hebrew first name, as has her sister and they weren't chosen at random.
Lurch is now sidelined. I have to say she wasn't at all typical of UK horsey\countryside people, they tend towards conservative\right wing libertarian politics.
