Rick Lowe

Every now and then a story makes the press about the repressive regime in Cuba.

This one, at the Associated Press should make your hair stand on edge.

I'm told that at the Constitutional Conference for The Bahamas in the early 1970's the PLP Government of the day wanted to enshrine a provision that Bahamians would have to seek the permission of the Government to travel to a different island in The Bahamas family of islands.

Apparently the British would not allow such a provision. So "There, but for the grace of god, goes The Bahamas".

See the AP story below detailing the lack of freedom Cuban's have to put up with.

In Cuba, license plates tag drivers, not the car

By WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press Writer

HAVANA (AP) — It's Cuba's twist on "you are what you drive": Here, you are your license plate.

A rainbow of colors and an alphabet soup of codes tell the discerning eye how important you are in the egalitarian revolution as you whiz by – your nationality, what you do for a living and often how high you rank at work.

"The kind of car you drive says something," says Norberto Leon, a retiree who collects pocket change for watching parked cars. "The license plate, it says more."

Cuba's painstaking color-coding of license plates – a system copied from the former Soviet Union – is one way authorities have kept tabs on people and their vehicles for decades.

The government owns most cars. They have blue plates with letters and numbers that indicate when and where the vehicle can operate and whether the driver can use it for personal as well as professional reasons.

Read the entire article here…