VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis will visit Cuba before arriving in the United States in the last week of September, the Vatican said Wednesday.
The Vatican spokesman, Rev. Federico Lombardi, confirmed the Cuba leg to reporters but didn’t provide details or dates.
Francis has been credited with helping the United States and Cuba reach their historic rapprochement by writing to the leaders of both countries and having the Vatican host their delegations for the final negotiations. Francis’ visit to Cuba would be a way for him to push the process forward.
He is scheduled to visit three U.S. cities starting around Sept. 23. He will address Congress and meet with President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington, address the United Nations in New York and attend a church rally for families in Philadelphia.
Francis will become the third pope to visit Cuba. In 1998, St. John Paul II said during his visit that Cuba should “open itself up to the world, and may the world open itself up to Cuba.”
Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI followed up with a 2012 trip during which he voiced the Vatican’s long-standing position that the U.S. embargo was unjust and only hurt the most vulnerable on the island.
Francis also has spoken out against the U.S. embargo while also condemning socialism.
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He’s heard about their artisanal cigar manufacturing facilities, where the leaves are first infused with the purest over proof domestic rums and then handrolled down the inner thighs of government-inspected officially-declared virgins.
In a less nuts world, you’d think at least one if not both of the presidential candidates of one of the only two ruling American political parties who claims a mere one generation’s separation from Cuban nationality would get on a plane or even a speedboat, and travel the couple of hours at most down to Havana to do a great and meet photo op with the symbolic leader of Christianity and the actual supreme human authority of their sect each of them actually belongs to, WOULDN’T you?
But no: because it’s too COMMIE RADICAL there, and this Pope - this Pope who’s working actively to get the Vatican out of the clutches of the Italian mafia and out fo the loan shark bidness and free from the horrors of child molestation as a fringe benefit of priesthood - this Pope according to those two mooks is somehow too much of a LIBTARD and acting way too commie pinko all ecumenical for them to risk the wrath fo their base support.
I still wouldn’t want to be his food taster.
… which implies you’d be open to being a food taster for SOME one, right?
See, I doubt that.
BFD (I got a message here that I needed to be a little more expressive, but I don’t think so do you?)
Bienvenido a Cuba
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/cu0201.jpg,
from the series, “See See Havana”,
http://www.efn.org/~hkrieger/cuba.htm