Student Paper sources

Los Angeles Times: Bush Took Quote Out of Context, Researcher Says:

In a hotel conference room in Tampa, Fla., on Friday, Bush told law enforcement officials that Fidel Castro was brazenly promoting sex tourism to Cuba.

"The dictator welcomes sex tourism. Here's how he bragged about the industry," Bush said. "This is his quote: 'Cuba has the cleanest and most educated prostitutes in the world.' "

Asked about the source for the quote, White House officials provided a link to a 2001 paper, written by Trumbull, on the website of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.

At the time he wrote the paper, Trumbull was a Dartmouth College undergraduate, and the paper won a prize from the association as the best student paper of the year. Now a law student at Vanderbilt University, Trumbull does not remember the source for the wording of the Castro quote, which he did not footnote.

"I don't know why I don't have a footnote for that," said Trumbull, 24, who is clerking this summer for a federal judge in Puerto Rico. "That was before I was in law school and understood that you have to footnote everything."

Trumbull says the quote was probably a paraphrase of comments the Cuban leader made in 1992, which have been oft-repeated and seem to have taken on a life of their own.

But regardless of the exact wording, Trumbull says the president's speech misconstrued the meaning, which he says should have been clear from his paper.

"It shows that they didn't read much of the article," Trumbull said in a telephone interview.

According to Trumbull, who conducted field research in Cuba, prostitution boomed in the Caribbean nation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, providing an important source of currency for the Cuban economy. Castro, who outlawed prostitution when he took power in 1959, initially had few resources to combat it. But beginning around 1996, Cuban authorities began to crack down on the practice.

Although prostitution still exists, Trumbull said, it is far less visible, and it would be inaccurate to say the government promotes it.

Even when Castro made the remarks, Trumbull said, he was not boasting about Cuba's prostitutes as sex workers.

"Castro was merely trying to emphasize some of the successes of the revolution by saying 'even our prostitutes our educated,' " Trumbull said. "Castro was trying to defend his revolution against negative publicity. He was in no way bragging about the opportunities for sex tourism on the island."

On Monday, administration officials acknowledged that they did not have a source for the wording of the president's citation other than Trumbull's paper. A White House spokeswoman defended the inclusion, arguing it expressed an essential truth about Cuba.

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The State Department official later found the original quote, which he acknowledged was much less succinct than the president's version.

"There are hookers, but prostitution is not allowed in our country," Castro told Cuba's National Assembly in July 1992, according to a translation by the British Broadcasting Corp. "There are no women forced to sell themselves to a man, to a foreigner, to a tourist. Those who do so do it on their own, voluntarily…. We can say that they are highly educated hookers and quite healthy, because we are the country with the lowest number of AIDS cases."