In this video (in Spanish) O2B candidate Joe Garcia essentially accuses the right-wing Cuban-American Frank Calzon of the Center for Free Cuba of essentially pilfering tax-payer funds. Later in the show, Calzon throws a hissy fit and storms out (and you don't need to know Spanish to be entertained by this clip):
A subsequent federal audit found $500,000 missing from Calzon's operation, lost into the pocket of the corrupt South Florida Cuban-American mafia. Just like Garcia had charged. Now, after finding more such discrepancies, Congress has frozen all funding for these corrupt groups.
Congress has put the U.S. Agency for International Development's $45 million Cuba program's 2008 funding on hold, following a series of troubling audits and cases of massive fraud, The Miami Herald has learned.
In a quest to get the funding hold lifted, U.S. AID on Friday ordered a bottoms-up review of all its Cuba democracy programs and suspended a Miami anti-Castro exile group that spent at least $11,000 of federal grant money on personal items.
Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., ordered a hold on the U.S. AID Cuba program funding last month, in part in response to a $500,000 embezzlement at the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington disclosed earlier this year, federal officials said.
In a memo sent Friday to various members of Congress, Stephen Driesler, AID's deputy assistant administrator for legislative and public affairs, said the agency recently implemented stricter financial reviews. That new review turned up irregularities at the Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia (Group in Support of Democracy), a Miami group criticized in the past for using federal funds to send Nintendo games to Cuba [...]
A report by the Cuban-American National Foundation released in May showed that less than 17 percent of $65 million in federal Cuba aid funds spent during the past 10 years went to ''direct, on-island assistance.'' The bulk of the money, the report said, went to academic studies and expenses of exile organizations, mostly in Miami and Washington.
The report echoed findings by The Miami Herald in 2006 and a congressional Government Accountability Office audit that found lax oversight of the programs and came as the Bush administration prepares to dole out a record $45.7 million in Cuba democracy grants.
This is essentially a big chunk of the payoff the corrupt Cuban exile community gets for having its three South Florida Cuban American representatives (and Democrat Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, too). $45.7 million doled out in patronage fashion to all the co-conspirators, and that's not even including the millions wasted on Radio Marti in similar fashion. Democracy in Cuba? Pshaw! There are fancy dinners to be bought! The high life to be lived.
As you can see in the videos above (even if you don't speak Spanish) is that Joe Garcia has been fighting for accountability for those who receive US tax dollars, and isn't one to let ideology override the interests of the taxpayers.
On the web:
Joe Garcia for Congress
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