Cuba: US Using New Weapon Against Us -- Spam 139
mpicpp (3454017) writes in with news about accusations from Cuban officials about a spamming campaign against the country by the U.S.. "Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam. 'It's overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,' said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA. At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba's creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages. The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature. Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over about five hours."
The sheer volume! (Score:5, Funny)
300,000 in five hours? God forbid!
Re:The sheer volume! (Score:5, Funny)
Just think. To deliver an attack like that, the US government must have had some sort of time machine, with Ronald Reagan shouting "Now witness the destructive power of this fully armed and operational ARPANET!" before turning on, um, maybe a couple dozen modems at once.
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Yes, Cuba too is targeted by corporate America, its not just for the citizens of the US anymore.
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This is pretty serious business. At a potential maximum of 140 octects/message, that's (just)Over 40 Megabytes delivered in the course of 5 hours. Just think. To deliver an attack like that, the US government must have had some sort of time machine, with Ronald Reagan shouting "Now witness the destructive power of this fully armed and operational ARPANET!" before turning on, um, maybe a couple dozen modems at once.
Cuba's lucky. A lot of the modems got a busy signal. Otherwise it could have been worse.
Re:The sheer volume! (Score:5, Insightful)
300k SMS in five hours ? That's just 18 SMS / second.
Add three zeros and you're still not making even the oldest GSM network in the world sweat.
Sounds like a big bowl of boloney mixed with a lot of malarkey.
Perhaps the explanation is since everything is censored in Cuba, perhaps the govt minders were overwhelmed trying to censor that much SMS, that would actually make some sense.
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Re:The sheer volume! (Score:4, Interesting)
It's 2009, networks were smaller then.
According to this [wikipedia.org] there were just 300k mobiles in Cuba in 2008.
So it was actually an attempt to spam every person with a mobile in Cuba with pro-US propaganda. And it's just one of many such political spammings, and they still continue.
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Checking my last cell bill, I think that's about the combined average rate for my kids and wife during any typical 5 hour period.
Re:The sheer volume! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, so their cellular networks are not quite as advanced as much of the rest of the world. How did you expect them to keep up, given that economic sanctions prohibit most producers of relevant hard- and software from trading with Cuba? Given the circumstances they have to chose their battles, I guess. It is a miracle how they managed to build up one of the most advanced healthcare systems in Latin America.
By the way, there was a really fascinating AP story [wikipedia.org] about a related US attempt to disrupt this sovereign nation: USAID covertly set up a fake twitter service, complete with shell companies, executives recruited on false pretexts, and so on. It reads like a bad spy novel, until you realize how sad it is that this counts as "development". If these were my taxdollars at work, I'd go see about that pitchfork.
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True, though Chinese telecom becoming widely available is a recent thing, certainly relative to the decades of sanctions. Also, if a western trade delegation were to put the pressure on, they might decide the most profitable way forward would be to not supply Cuba. I'm not saying this is happening in this instance, but that kind of thing has definitely happened in the past.
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The embargo is a serious problem. With it gone, Cuba would be able to develop one hell of a tourist industry, and replace its aging hotels and a lot of its infrastructure in months. I've been there (as a Bulgarian citizen, in the Cold War days) and as a vacation destination, it has amazing potential.
When I first came to the States, I had a very hard time understanding why the hell the US is still keeping the embargo going. Nowadays, I have a theory.
The US has a rather weird election system. Look it up i
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Cuba won't magically become awesome 20 seconds after the embargo ends. The embargo is simply one symptom of a larger problem within the country.
Their leadership has put them through 60 years of suffering, regardless of what is 'right' or 'wrong', they leadership COULD have actually ended the embargo, but didn't and instead refused to accept that under Castro (original, brother, son, whatever), Cuba will never be anything.
Take the Mozilla CEO thing as an example. Doesn't matter if it was right, wrong, lega
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OK, how is Cuba supposed to end the embargo? I don't think the Cuban Navy is out there turning away cargo and passenger ships, or the Cuban Air Force keeping airports clear of capitalist culture. As far as I can tell, the problem is Cuban exiles and their descendents in Florida, and the ability of one well-organized group to exert disproportionate influence on one tightly focused cause (i.e., an intensive purpose), and generic residual anti-communism. In any case, the embargo is US-imposed, and a result
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As for South Florida ... you do realize 99% of the people you are referring to are dead now right? Most of the ones you're thinking of would be at least 80 years old, some well over 100. The Cuban exiles really don't matter any more either.
You're living in the 1960s and seem to have missed the evidence of the last 60 years.
Did you miss the part where I repeatedly said "or their descendents"? I am talking from personal experience with not just individuals, but families which have "Castro and Cuba" as a bers
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They don't care about the country, they care more about their own selfishness than anything else. Ending the embargo wouldn't make that go away, Cuba would still be a shit hole because its leaders are utterly selfish pricks who use the country for their own benefit and NOTHING else.
Selfish pricks who set a state policy that makes it possible to provide free education and free health care for everyone that is. Cubans have a life expectancy of 79.4 years (USA 79.8) according to WHO estimates [wikipedia.org] and the infant mortality in Cuba is 4.76, (US 5.2) according to CIA estimates [wikipedia.org]. I have been to Cuba a few times, last time was 2006, and I can say they are certainly not rich, most are rather poor when considering "western" standards, but Cuba is certainly not a shit hole.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:They might be right. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the level of brain-dead scheme that the CIA has pulled many times in the past, but it's just as likely that they're just getting overwhelmed by one incompetent spammer with a fat pipe...
-jcr
Not sure how fat of a pipe you need to send roughly 17 text messages a second. But 300k text messages over 5 hours isn't really that much, unless they are going to a small amount of numbers. Must be running some old systems in Cuba.
Re:They might be right. (Score:5, Informative)
I work at an SMS aggregator. We are the fat pipe. We run at a peak capacity of 2000 messages per second per connection to an operator. Cuba has one operator (officially).
Operators are capable of handling more than we can send, but in that 5 hours we could have flooded their network with 36m messages. 300k is a drop in the bucket.
If we used multiple routes instead of direct to the operator, we could have run hundreds of millions in that same period.
check us out. http://www.cmtelecom.com/why-cm
Re:They might be right. (Score:5, Funny)
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I can see why you posted as AC you spamming cunt.
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2000 messages a second isn't a fat pipe. You're just another shitty spammer.
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Not sure how fat of a pipe you need to send roughly 17 text messages a second. But 300k text messages over 5 hours isn't really that much, unless they are going to a small amount of numbers. Must be running some old systems in Cuba.
It's not the size of the pipe, it's the severity of the clog's filth. You grossly underestimate the content of these messages. TFA says some contained political rhetoric written by the CIA. I have quite a few routers that will barf core at the mere smell of partisan politics in the filters, and Cuba is getting weapon's grade bullshit!
Re:They might be right. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the article it's unlikely that it's a spammer. Apparently the USA has actively spammed Cuba in the past under the argument of 'fostering free speech'. We built and distributed programs that are illegal in Cuba. It would be similar to people from Iraqi coming over to the USA and physically forcing as many people as they could to wear headscarfs under the argument of improving our morals. They have no more right to force their values on us as we do to force our values on Cuba's population.
Our government confirms it had these programs. They were stopped due to funding cuts (some funding cuts actually work, yay!). This article isn't about the 300,000 text messages that are known to have been sent by USA back in 2009, but about Cuba's new claim that the USA has refunded and restarted it's spamming efforts. I really hope we're not wasting money on crap like this.
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Thanks for trying to post some truth, but between the government astroturf and the useful idiots there is not much chance anyone will pay attention.
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I expect you're one of those people who thinks Venezuela's current government is "forging a bold new alternative to neo-liberalism", aren't you.
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I, for one, have no illusions about the nobility of Castro or the Venezuelan govt. (or Iran or North Korea, for that matter). But I also am not a fool who think that hundreds of thousands of CIA and NSA employees just sit around all day staring at walls. The CIA has a long, well-established, and VERY shameful history in Cuba (even engaging in open terrorism [wikipedia.org] there).
So you can be sure that pretty much any effort to that undermines the Castro government there is AT LEAST being supported and/or funded by the CI
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I expect you're one of those people who thinks Venezuela's current government is "forging a bold new alternative to neo-liberalism", aren't you.
I certainly do. The GNI per capita has soared since the Bolivarian revolution. Big reduction in poverty. Longer life expectancy. Better access to water. And unlike the USA, the Venezuelan government is running a surplus, not a deficit.
http://translate.google.com/tr... [google.com]|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8
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But Chavez was elected by 70% of the population, so that means he was a dictator! And they're closing down radio stations with expired licenses and giving that bandwidth to stations that don't belong to international mega-corps, so that means they're oppressing free speech! Or something.
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Are you denying the fact that the Bolivarians have won the last 18 out of 19 elections. Or are you just assuming that because it's politics you don't agree with it MUST have been corrupt elections - despite Jimmy Carter saying: "As a matter of fact, of the 92 elections that we've monitored, I would say that the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world."
Here's why you have the wrong beliefs you do:
http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
Maybe it's you that's naive and stupid?
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Hahahaha. Oh the hilarity. Venezuela, progressive paradise [bloomberg.com].
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I guess you didn't read all of the article.
Price controls and increased food imports helped boost the caloric intake of the average Venezuelan by 50 percent during Chavezâ(TM)s first 12 years in office, with rice consumption surging 70 percent, according to the National Nutrition Institute. Using the countryâ(TM)s oil wealth, Chavez cut poverty in half before his death from cancer in March, according to the World Bank.
Great progress indeed. You have to remember how badly off the people were before the revolution.
âoeRegulated goods are just too cheap to stay on the shelves.â
As opposed to the US, where the poor have to go to food banks because they can't afford food.
For sure, right now there are some economic problems in Venezuela. But unlike America they haven't had to prop up their largest companies with billions of taxpayer dollars.
The Venezualan Bolivarian Government has won 18 out of the last 19 elections. And that's in an election syst
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The Iraq analogy is pretty flawed, as Iraq would be asserting their morals upon a democratic population. USA's target is an authoritarian government. If you need an Iraq analogy, it would be like the government of Iraq sending people in the US spam SMS messages espousing the virtues of Islam. Annoying, to be sure, but not exactly a breathtaking intrusion on sovereignty.
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I want to know what's so bizarre about "Cuban officials accusing the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars." I think the CIA's many, many efforts to assasinate Castro over the years have been well-documented [wikipedia.org]. An exploding cigar would be no less bizarre than many of the attempts we already know about.
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The amusing thing is... (Score:1, Flamebait)
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
Re:The amusing thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unless they truly fuck something up, people just keep accruing seniority until they die or finally become too senile to disguise their senility. We still have some years left before we've aged out all the cold warriors.
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True, you'll always get people still fighting old wars whether left or right wing. But as the years go by they slowly slip into irrelevance and die off. However unless Putin suddenly decides Cuba is his new best friend - unlikely - its importance in world affairs is only going to go further and further down the list.
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Russia is still a close friend of Cuba. But don't forget that China is too. And they are heading towards being the worlds biggest superpower.
Re:The amusing thing is... (Score:4, Interesting)
>feds just itching to go fight the last war
I don't think the feds want to go to war. Cuba is communist and parts of it work. (like health care for the amount they spend). If they lifted the embargo and stop messing with them they could become a very successful communist country.
The success would be more due to them being a great tourist location and less because they are communist but the right wing is simply not going to tolerate a successful communist county if they can do anything about it.
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"...a great tourist location..."
Have you been there?
Some of the beaches are very very nice, but most hotels are *very* average, and the food, while adequate, is meh-level at best.
That is why it's one of, if not THE cheapest all-inclusive destinations in the Caribbean.
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Sure, right now. But I have no doubt that if all the "off limits" stuff dissipated tomorrow it would be neigh on 5 years before 5 star hotels and brand new sandy beaches with golf courses popped up.
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You misspelled "days".
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Don't underestimate the PR power Cuba still holds. If you can show that you're a badass mofo who won't take a shit from Cuba and take every chance to piss them off, your chance to get elected rise considerably in certain areas of the US.
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That time is rapidly disappearing, all the old Cubans who Castor ousted and fled to the US are dying or dead, just like Castro. The money to politicians from them is also dying. As such, our giving a shit about Cuba ... rapidly dying as well.
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Re:The amusing thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another, perhaps less amusing thing is that the US actually do care; at least as long as there is a noisy group of displaced, Cuban voters to please.
Re:The amusing thing is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idiotic thing is that you think "the US" is a monolith, instead of a bunch of agencies made up by people, with plenty of incentive to use tax payer money for useless or even counterproductive things, like attacking Iraq in response to 9/11, or killing kids with drones. If anything, "The US" isn't in the business of dealing with threats, it's in the business of creating them while talking about mushroom clouds and fucking its own population as it jumps on chairs in fear of imaginary mice; and the population responds with hollow chauvinistic sound bites aimed about other populations to make itself feel better about it. You're pinned to the floor, get fleeced for everything of value you got, and scream "ahhh! sweet victory!" because it's even worse elsewhere. Fucking pathetic.
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FWIW, I never feel good about arguing for the self-interest of the population. But I tried the whole "stop being a Nazi" thing and people just don't give a fuck. Some are fine with being "evil" as long as they think they'll keep "winning".
I still remember when I just got interwebs, 2000 on the stileproject forums (oh god), how I flamed some people for talking about how the US could win a nuclear war against some country or other -- I told them that if they think any of the posters would get a place in a bun
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.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay.
It cares enough that the embargo is still in full force.
Re:The amusing thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)
.. that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay. Since the USSR collapsed its been pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things other than a source of refugees and comedy revolutionaries in green slacks with silly beards.
Well, the problem is that there are some people who do care and their influence is way out of whack with regards to their actual numbers. There are a small number of members of the US House and Senate who are offspring of Cuban refugees and they have a lot of influence. The younger generation of people who immigrated many years ago has little interest in continuing the embargo, but there are still enough of the old hardcore anti-Castro people in Florida that no president is willing to undo the embargo for fear of the next presidential election going against his party. Florida is a hotly contested state that gives a very thin majority to whoever wins it in the presidential elections. Florida has a lot of electoral votes. So if you piss off, say, 40 or 50 thousand voters who care a lot (maybe too much) about the Castro brothers and Cuba, you could lose the next presidential election. So the president never has the courage to drop the embargo as either he or his party's next candidate will face angry voters in the next presidential election and it could be enough to decide the race in favor of the other party. It's rather remarkable to see an entire country held hostage to the whims of a really small group of people over one issue, but that's exactly how it is here.
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For that matter, why can't US students study medicine in Cuba? Why can't Cuban-trained doctors practice in the US? Students in much of the world have the opportunity to study medicine in Cuba for no charge, in exchange for the promise to practice medicine in under-served communities in their own countries for (IIRC) 5 years.
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The amusing thing is that the Cuban government still think the US gives a damn about their 3rd world Island apart from Guantanamo Bay.
If they didn't, the US government wouldn't still be depriving their own citizens of the right to smoke Cuban cigars. Nor implementing any of the other severe economic sanctions (economic war).
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Not as long as Monsanto, Dole, Cargill, and ADM see Cuban agriculture as too much potential competition.
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You seem to have a very simple model of the world. Simple, and wrong.
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There is a meaningful and useful difference between a painting of a clock and a clock that runs 5 minutes fast.
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"bizarre plots over the years"...Yes, the CIA has tried many stupid ideas to get the "radical leader"...exploding cigars, poison diving suits given as a gift, cancer virus, to name a few. Can't we all just get along, smoke wonderful cigars, drink rum and lay on the beach?
I don't know what is more worrisome: that the CIA actually tried these things - or that each one failed.
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Plots... the funniest of which was the powder-in-the-shoes-to-make-the-beard-fall-out. Exploding conch shells were in the works, too, I suppose for if the poison diving suit didn't work.
As far as the pleasures, don't forget cruising around in the convertible '59 Cadillac.
Napalm would be more effective (Score:2)
It would take care of Fidel's beard once and for all.
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You mean treaties like the ABM Treaty? The chemical weapons and bio-weapons treaties? The Geneva Accords? The UN Treaty? The OAS Treaty? The only reason that the US hasn't invaded Cuba (which Ronnie Raygun wanted to do until the Joint Chiefs talked him out of it) is because an invasion of the island would have made Vietnam look like a roaring success in comparison.
Accused? We planned to do it. (Score:5, Funny)
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- paid for by the tax-payer.
I like no 5:
5. Contaminated cigar. They may have given up on the TNT stogie, but the idea of spiking his smokes was still being floated around. The CIA even went as far as to recruit a double agent who would slip Castro a cigar filled with botulin, a toxin that would kill the leader in short order. The double agent was allegedly given the cigars in February of 1961, but he apparently got cold feet.
Cold feet, or maybe he was just dying for a smoke.
Snowden (Score:2)
The crazy thing is that with what we've learnt about the US the past years, and the governments total disregard for anything besides their own power, I'm not really sure if these claims are as outlandish as they sound.
I think we've come a good way when we no longer think that the claims of the crazy are untrue just because they sound crazy.
And yes, the volumes given are so tiny that it could very well be something that some agency discovered on their TODO list under the "do when you've got a minute" section
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It gets old quite fast. But I think he's going to go away soon, he's already started simply copying the same nonsense post everywhere.
Anyway, if you want him, you can have him. :-)
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The funny thing is that people seem to think the US is the only one doing this. The US isn't unique, its just the one that most recently got caught.
Cuba tries the same thing ... they just kind of such at it, relative to the US.
All countries do, except maybe the Scandinavian countries, but lets face it, they're still trying to figure out why they haven't moved to somewhere with a sane climate.
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Yes, that's probably the reason why around the world, governments seem to be much less interested in following those revelations than one would assume - they fear their own dirty laundry could show up if a serious investigation would be launched.
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Please don't feed my troll.
I'm serious. He has serious mental issues and everything you write to him only adds oil to the fire, no matter how well-meaning it is. People with mental problems don't read your words the way your write them. It takes a professional to even talk to them.
if i was in charge of an island nation (Score:2)
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Filtered... nice.
North Korea, Iran, Syria ... is that you guys?
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And Australia,
Plus pretty much all European states, China, and the rest of Asia, all the old-school Feudal middle eastern western 'allies', and Western/Chinese puppet governments in Africa.
And lets not forget that without net-neutrality the US is hardly providing equal access to any thought not being backed by big money.
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what passes as freedom of speech in the USA is about like considering a rape a sexual encounter among consenting adults
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Waiting weeks or years to get the next episode of shows airing right now without a .torrent? A few well crafted spoiler tweets gets through and you'd be gutted and roasting like a pig.
Hmmm this sounds familiar (Score:1)
kinda weird... (Score:2)
my dad was Cuban...came over in '59 when Castro came to power, and made a really good life for himself.
funny thing is...he loved spam...said it was really popular over there.
go figure.
USA v Cuba (Score:2)
fun fact (Score:2)
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we were scared of castro when he had nuclear arms
Huh? When did this happen? Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis the Soviet nukes never arrived at the island, just the disassembled missiles.
Cuba? (Score:2)
Not us (Score:1)
It's that Nigerian prince, I tell ya!