Defecting from Cuba

A Cuban choir [free reg. req'd], on tour in Toronto, found that some of its members — 11 out of 41 of them — would gladly trade their spot on the tour for the opportunity to seek political asylum in Canada or the United States. The choir, the Coro Nacional de Cuba, was founded by Che Guevara in the same year that Fidel Castro led the communist revolution.

Wow. Even in the 21st century, the workers' paradise doesn't have the appeal it wants to believe it does. It's sort of like the old East Germany, where the workers were so happy they had to put up fences and guard towers and attack dogs to keep out jealous capitalists.

Article 13, Paragraph 2, of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights specifically requires that every person be given the right to leave his or her home country. (Of course, much though we in the United States enjoy pointing out the Communists' hypocritical disregard for this Article, there are a few — Articles 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11, notably — that don't reflect so well on our nation at the moment.) Both Cuba and the United States are signatories to the UDHR, which was proclaimed by the General Assembly on 1948-12-10.

Picked up off of KRON's TheBayAreaIsTalking.com aggregator from "A Cappella News," quoting the Toronto Globe and Mail.