The propoganda works: Low risker's demand swine flu vaccine

LOS ANGELES – It was bound to happen: Some people who aren't at high risk for swine flu complications got the much-in-demand vaccine.

Sometimes they were healthy adults or senior citizens instead of kids, pregnant women and people with health problems.

Before Los Angeles County health officials stepped up screening at their flu clinics, Natalie Thompson sailed through the long line and got the vaccine along with her 8-year-old son, even though she's not in one of the priority groups.

"If I can get it, I'm not gonna say no," said Thompson, 35, of Hollywood Hills.

Another mom, Katy Radparvar, didn't say no either.

"Our doctor doesn't have it yet," said the 41-year-old woman who was vaccinated along with her three children at a public health vaccination site in suburban Encino last week.

Public health officials don't want to be vaccine police. Many don't turn anyone away who wants the vaccine, though some locations are tougher than others.

"For many this is a frustrating process and we really sympathize with those who show up at a clinic and can't get vaccinated," said Los Angeles County public health director Dr. Jonathan Fielding.

Across the country, thousands have waited in line and many have been turned away, as manufacturers have trickled out the slow-to-produce vaccine. Things are improving, and now about 25 million doses are available, the government says.

Aware of scant supplies up front, Santa Barbara County clinics administered their 4,400 shots to pregnant women only. San Diego County is only immunizing those on the priority list, but is taking the word of residents.

Nevada is using the honor system with vaccinations offered on a first-come, first-served basis to those who identify themselves as at-risk for the H1N1 virus.

"We really are hoping people go on the honor system and let us immunize people in the priority groups," Southern Nevada Health District spokeswoman Stephanie Bethel said. "I think, for the most part, it's working."

In Oregon, Portland metro area officials say pregnant women and children are moved to the front of the lines and inoculated before the general public.

"We assertively asked those who were not in the priority group to move to the end of the line, so when we ran out of vaccine, those people who were left were those who were not at risk," said health officer Dr. Gary Oxman. "And people have responded well to it."

The vaccine shortfall prompted Wisconsin state health officials this week to remind local health agencies "to strongly encourage" announcements about the limited vaccine supply and the focus on vaccinating high-risk groups first.

Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said local health departments are doing the best they can under challenging conditions.

"Despite those best efforts, it doesn't surprise me that people who are not in high priority groups are appearing at clinics for vaccination," he said. "It's difficult to restrict vaccine simply to the priority groups."

One of the doctors who helped draw up guidelines for vaccine priority groups also isn't surprised at how things are unfolding.

The government's vaccine advisory panel "did not expect vaccine police to be set up around the country," said Dr. William Schaffner, a flu specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who is on the panel.

If vaccine demand is low in some locations, it makes sense for non-priority groups to get it instead of wasting the supply.

"I don't consider it a problem," said Schaffner. "I consider it more of a problem if vaccine is left unused."

That's what happened in the 2004-05 flu season when there was a shortage of seasonal flu vaccine. Many older healthy people refused to get the shot so that those who had health problems would have access to vaccine.

"One of the things that was learned was to be careful about turning people away because we might end up with a lot of vaccine at the end of the year," said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention But right now, there aren't many vaccine leftovers to be found. Every morning, Anne Jenkins of Shreveport, La., makes a round of calls to ask doctors and health clinics if they have the injectable swine flu vaccine. She is 23 weeks pregnant.

After seeing four elderly women requesting swine flu vaccine — to no avail — at a local military treatment facility she thought to herself, "you're not on the list."

Though local officials tell Jenkins the vaccine won't be available until mid-November, she's ready to compete for her dose when it arrives.

"You feel the animal instinct come out," she said.

Was clinton duped? Some say he met with a Kim Jong-Ill look alike

Seoul, South Korea – Will the real Kim Jong-il please stand up?

A number of analysts here are convinced that not all the photos being released of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, are really photos of Kim Jong-il.

Instead, they say, a look-alike has been standing in for him on some of the 122 trips he's reportedly made this year to the countryside, factories, cultural events, military units, and all sorts of other venues.

Some observers say the North Korean leader is too ill to make all these appearances. One Japanese analyst claims President Clinton didn't meet with Kim Jong-il in August – he met with a Mr. Kim double.

The evidence of Kim stand-ins is far from verified, but several North Korean refugees here say that Kim has not one but several look-alikes playing his role.

Still, it's logical that for security reasons, Kim has one or more stand-ins, as did former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein before the US invasion in 2003. One argument is that Kim has no time for all those trips outside Pyongyang while his health remains uncertain and he's preparing his youngest son to take over as early as next year.

Ha Tae-young, president of Open Radio for North Korea, which broadcasts two hours a day via shortwave into North Korea, cites the word of one recent North Korean defector.

"He says he knows a girl whose father is the actor for Kim Jong-il," says Mr. Ha. "Recently Kim Jong-il loses fat. He's very skinny these days. The defector says, If Kim Jong-il looks skinny, the actor can do the same thing."

Some turn resemblance into acting career
Here in South Korea, there's a booming business in Kim Jong-il look-alikes. Dozens of people in recent years have portrayed Kim Jong-il in television comedy shows, nightclub routines, and serious movies and dramas.

After the inter-Korean summit of June 2000, in which Kim Jong-il received South Korea President Kim Dae-jung in Pyongyang, the South Korean government discouraged such satires for fear of upsetting reconciliation with the North.

Still, from time to time South Koreans delight in appearing on TV flaunting the curly-haired bouffant hairstyle, platform shoes, and protruding stomach for which the Dear Leader was known before he disappeared from view for months after reportedly suffering a stroke in August 2008.

The wave of public appearances reported by the North Korean propaganda machine since then to show he's in good health convinces some analysts that North Korean actors are portraying the Dear Leader, too – but in dead seriousness.

"That's possible," says Choi Jin-wook, senior fellow and specialist on North Korea at the Korea Institute of National Unification. "These dictators always need look-alikes for security reasons. Kim Jong-il is giving 'on-the-spot guidance' too often for his health."

Mr. Choi also says that North Korean photo editors are likely pasting in old pictures of Kim from previous times when he was in good health.

Did Clinton meet with look-alike?
No one here, however, is ready to go as far as Japanese writer Toshimitsu Shigemura, who has written two books and numerous articles claiming that Kim has been seriously ill for the past decade and may even have died.

Mr. Shigemura says that if the real Kim, looking wan and weak, appeared before the Supreme People's Assembly several days after North Korea fired a long-range missile on April 5, then it must have been a look-alike who hosted former US President Bill Clinton in August.

"They were totally different people," says Mr. Shigemura, a former correspondent for Mainichi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, who now teaches international relations at Waseda University in Tokyo. "In August, he looked very healthy."

Shigemura suspects that a skilled actor delivered the lines to Mr. Clinton during their three-hour, 17-minute meeting, which ended with Mr. Clinton flying back to the US with two journalists who had been held for 140 days.

Shigemura is equally convinced that an actor played Kim in recent meetings with China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, and the head of Hyundai Asan, the South Korean company responsible for developing special economic and tourist complexes in North Korea.

After the June 2000 summit, says Shigemura, Kim "was bedridden with diabetes" and "cannot walk by himself." He cites the names of three Japanese who claim to have met his look-alikes, including one who was told flatly, "I am a double."

One of them, a magician named Princess Tenko, Shigemura describes as a "close friend" of Kim, saw him more than once in visits to Pyongyang.

Fully self-possessed
Some analysts here, however, have trouble with Shigemura's analysis.

"There have been such rumors," says Kim Tae-woo, a veteran North Korea specialist at the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses. "Dictators usually do that, but we don't know whether this is real or fake."

The North Korean leader's preoccupation these days, he says, is arranging the succession of his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, still in his late 20s.

Ryoo Kihl-jae, professor at the University of North Korean Studies, is dubious about such reports. Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, Jang Song-taek, appears to be the most powerful figure after the Dear Leader, he says, "but his authority stems from Kim Jong-il" and two or three generals are vying for control.

For now, says Mr. Ryoo, Kim is "living well," and the reports of a double standing in for him are "just imagination."

Aiming low: schools lower standards for student achievement

WASHINGTON – Many states declare students to have grade-level mastery of reading and math when they do not, the Education Department reported Thursday.

The agency compared state achievement standards to the more challenging standards behind the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress.

State standards were lower, and there were big differences in where each state set the bar.

The Obama administration said the report bolsters its effort to persuade all states to adopt the same set of tougher standards for what students should know.

"States are setting the bar too low," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said. "We're lying to our children when we tell them they're proficient, but they're not achieving at a level that will prepare them for success once they graduate."

The federal government can't impose a set of standards, because education is largely up to states.

But Duncan noted he is offering millions of dollars in grants to encourage states to accept a set of standards being developed by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers. The grants come from the federal stimulus law, which set aside $5 billion to push Obama's vision of educational reform.

While the standards are not yet final, every state but Texas and Alaska already has committed to work toward adopting them.

The head of the department's Institute of Education Sciences said the biggest concern should be the wide disparity in standards among the states. A student who is proficient in one state might not be proficient in another, the report said.

"Why are these performance standards so far apart, and why are expectations set so widely from one place to another?" IES director John Easton said.

House Education Committee chairman George Miller said a child's education should not be determined by zip code.

"If we are serious about rebuilding our economy and restoring our competitiveness," Miller, D-Calif., said, "then it's time for states to adopt a common core of internationally benchmarked standards that can prepare all children in this country to achieve and succeed in this global economy."

The report by the department's statistics arm compared state achievement levels to achievement levels on NAEP. It found that many states deemed children to be proficient or on grade level when they would rate "below basic," or lacking even partial mastery, in reading and math under the NAEP standards.

Among the findings:

• Thirty-one states deemed fourth-graders proficient in reading when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Mississippi's standards were lowest, and Massachusetts' were highest.

• Seventeen states deemed eighth-graders proficient at reading when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Tennessee's standards were lowest, and South Carolina's were highest.

• Ten states deemed fourth- and eighth-graders proficient at math when they would have rated below basic on NAEP. Tennessee's standards were lowest; Massachusetts had the highest fourth-grade math standards, and South Carolina had the highest eighth-grade standards.

In addition, the report said more states lowered standards than raised them from 2005 to 2007.

North Carolina state education official Lou Fabrizio said states face a dilemma because of No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law that prods schools to boost test scores to meet annual improvement goals.

States can set easier standards that ensure schools will meet the federally mandated goals, or they can set more challenging standards that help kids improve.

His state chose the latter, but Fabrizio said it was tough to explain that higher standards meant lower scores.

"That was a really difficult job for us to do and communicate to the public that students did not all of a sudden become very ignorant," he said.

North Carolina still has below-basic achievement standards for fourth- and eighth-grade reading.

Public option is back- House Dem's unveil health care bill

WASHINGTON – Cheered by President Barack Obama, House Democrats rolled out landmark legislation Thursday to extend health care to tens of millions who lack coverage, impose sweeping new restrictions on the insurance industry and create a government-run option to compete with private insurers.

But even as party leaders pointed toward a vote next week, there were fresh questions that went to the heart of their ambitious drive to remake the nation's health care system.

Congressional budget experts predicted the controversial government insurance option would probably cost consumers somewhat more than private coverage. At the same time, rank-and-file conservative Democrats sought additional information about the bill's overall impact on federal health care spending.

There was no official estimate on the total cost of the legislation, which ran to 1,990 pages. The Congressional Budget Office said the cost of additional coverage alone was slightly more than $1 trillion over a decade. But that omitted other items, including billions for disease prevention programs.

Yet another $230 billion or more in higher fees for doctors treating Medicare patients, included in an earlier version of the bill, was stripped out and will be voted on separately.

The measure "covers 96 percent of all Americans, and it puts affordable coverage in reach for millions of uninsured and underinsured families, lowering health care costs for all of us," boasted Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., at a ceremony attended by dozens of Democratic lawmakers. She spoke on the steps of the Capitol, not far from where Obama issued his inaugural summons for Congress to act more than nine months ago.

Pelosi said the legislation would reduce federal deficits over the next decade by $104 billion, and congressional budget experts said it would probably reduce them even further over the following 10 years.

While saying they expected a vote next week, Democratic leaders were careful not to claim they had yet rounded up enough votes to pass the legislation. Still, the day's events capped months of struggle and marked a major advance in their drive — and Obama's — to accomplish an overhaul of the health care system that has eluded presidents for a half-century.

Across the Capitol, the Democratic-controlled Senate is expected to begin debate within two weeks on a bill crafted by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. It, too, envisions a government-run insurance option, although states could opt out, unlike in the bill the House will vote on. That portion of the Senate version appears likely to be weakened even further, as moderates press for a standby system that would not go into effect until it was clear individual states were experiencing a lack of competition among private companies.

Obama called the House legislation "another critical milestone in the effort to reform our health care system."

Republican reaction was as swift as it was negative. "It will raise the cost of Americans' health insurance premiums; it will kill jobs with tax hikes and new mandates, and it will cut seniors' Medicare benefits," said the party's leader in the House, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio. He carried a copy of the 1,990-page measure into a news conference to underscore his claim it represented a government takeover of the health care system.

Republicans have already signaled their determination to make the health care debate a key issue in next year's congressional elections, when all 435 House seats will be on the ballot.

But their ability to block passage in the current House is nonexistent as long as Pelosi and her leadership can forge a consensus among the Democratic rank and file. The party holds 256 seats in the House, where 218 makes a majority.

Broad in scope, the House Democrats' bill attempts to build on the current system of employer-provided health care. It would require big companies to cover their employees and include federal subsidies to help small companies provide insurance for theirs, as well. Most individuals would be required to carry insurance, and much of the money in the legislation is dedicated to subsidies for those at lower incomes to help them afford coverage.

For those at even lower incomes, the bill provides for an expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal health program for the poor. Adults up to 150 percent of the poverty level — individuals making up to $16,245 and a family of four up to $33,075 — would be covered, a provision estimated to add 15 million to Medicaid.

One of the bill's major features is a new national insurance market, in which private companies could sell policies that meet federally mandated benefit levels, the government would offer competing coverage and consumers could shop for the policy that best met their needs.

In a bow to moderates, Democrats decided doctors, hospitals and other providers would be allowed to negotiate rates with the Health and Human Services Department for services provided in the government insurance option.

Liberals had favored a system in which fees would be dictated by the government, an approach that would have been less costly than what was settled on, and also would have moved closer to a purely government-run health care system than some Democrats favor.

The Congressional Budget Office said the result would be fees comparable to those doctors receive from private insurers. But for consumers, government-backed plans "would typically have premiums that are somewhat higher than the average premiums for private plans" sold in competition. As a result, it said enrollment would be only about 6 million.

Conservative Democrats known as Blue Dogs reacted to the overall CBO analysis by asking whether the bill would reduce the long-term rate of growth in federal spending. They noted the agency had said last summer that an earlier version would fail to do so, and they said they wanted updated answers "in order to make an informed decision."

Thursday's bill includes an array of new restrictions on the private insurance industry, in addition to forcing insurers to compete with the federal government for business.

Firms would be banned from denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions and limited in their ability to charge higher premiums on the basis of age.

They would be required to spend 85 percent of their income from premiums on coverage, effectively limiting their ability to advertise or pay bonuses. Additionally, the industry would be stripped of immunity from antitrust regulations covering price fixing, bid rigging and market allocation. And in a late addition to the bill, 30-year-old restrictions on the Federal Trade Commission's ability to look into the insurance industry would be erased.

In response, the industry's top lobbyist, Karen Ignagni, issued a statement containing a somewhat milder version of criticism than recently unleashed against the Senate's version of the legislation. "We are concerned" the House bill will violate assurances that individuals would be able to keep their insurance if they like it, she said. She said it would be responsible for "increasing health care costs for families and employers across the country and significantly disrupting the quality coverage on which millions of Americans rely today."

Ignagni added that the presence of a government-run insurance plan "would bankrupt hospitals, dismantle employer coverage, exacerbate cost-shifting from Medicare and Medicaid and ultimately increase the federal deficit."

While Democrats touted new benefits for seniors, the bill relies on more than $400 billion in cuts from projected Medicare spending over the next decade. Much of the money would come from the part of the program in which private companies offer coverage to seniors.

The bill's other major new source of revenue is from a proposed income tax surcharge of 5.4 percent on wealthy earners, individuals making at least $500,000 a year and couples $1 million or more.

The legislation includes other taxes, such as a 2.5 percent excise tax on the makers of medical devices, expected to raise $20 billion over a decade.

Russia wants a nuclear spaceship

MOSCOW -

Russia's space agency is planning to build a new spaceship with a nuclear engine, its chief said Wednesday.

Anatoly Perminov told a government meeting Wednesday that the preliminary design could be ready by 2012. He said it will then take nine more years and 17 billion rubles ($600 million, 400 million euros) to build the ship.

"The implementation of this project will allow us to reach a new technological level surpassing foreign developments," Perminov told a meeting which focused on communications and space technologies.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev urged the Cabinet to consider providing the necessary funding.

"It's a very serious project," Medvedev said. "We need to find the money."

Perminov's ambitious statement contrasted with the current state of the Russian space program, and sounded more like a plea for extra government funds than a detailed proposal.

Russia is using 40-year old Soyuz booster rockets and capsules to send crews to the International Space Station. Development of a replacement rocket and a prospective spaceship with a conventional propellant has dragged on with no end in sight.

Perminov described the proposed spaceship as a "unique breakthrough project," but offered few details.

He said that the ship will have a megawatt-class nuclear reactor, as opposed to small nuclear reactors that powered Soviet satellites. The Cold-War era Soviet spy satellites had reactors which produced just a few kilowatts of power and had a lifespan of just about a year.

Perminov didn't say what the new spaceship will be used for.

He and other officials have said that Russia needs a new spaceship to replace the old Soyuz for missions in Earth orbit, but they only have talked about a ship powered by a conventional rocket fuel so far.

Russian space agency also has mulled over prospective future missions to the moon and Mars, but hasn't yet set a specific time frame yet.

Corrupt bankers face the music, face protesters

CHICAGO (Reuters) – A top banking industry group on Monday defended the practices of traditional banks while facing protesters who railed against Wall Street abuses.

The American Bankers Association, which has gathered for its annual convention, said the protests were misplaced because it is largely community bankers that are attending.

"You did not make any abusive subprime loans; you did not take big bonuses for products that later blew up," ABA President Edward Yingling said during his opening remarks.

The Service Employees International Union, a major labor group, estimates that up to 5,000 people from different organizations will join the protests over the next couple of days outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers.

Protesters shook larger-than-life cutouts of JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon and retiring Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, while others dressed as grim reapers and held a sign saying "Greed Kills."

Andrea Frye, communications director with the Chicago nonprofit group National People's Coalition, said the ABA was an appropriate target for the protesters' anger because the group lobbies against regulatory reforms that would help consumers but hurt the big banks' profits.

"They're standing in the way by spending billions of dollars to fight meaningful rules," she said.

The ABA held security tight at its conference, checking badges with an ultraviolet light to ensure that the meetings proceeded uninterrupted.

Yingling, addressing the attendees, said the protest was "misdirected" and said it was frustrating to have traditional banks lumped together with Wall Street firms that engage in risky trading practices and have taken billions of dollars in taxpayers funds.

"I know it makes you angry, as it should," he told the convention attendees.

Smaller banks have also received bailout funds from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, although the amount of assistance has been much less.

The White House has said recently that banks can do more to help extend credit. President Barack Obama urged banks on Saturday to make more loans to small businesses.

"It's time for those banks to fulfill their responsibility to help ensure a wider recovery, a more secure system, and more broadly shared prosperity," he said.

Experts say current Healthcare system wastes $800 billion a year!

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. healthcare system is just as wasteful as President Barack Obama says it is, and proposed reforms could be paid for by fixing some of the most obvious inefficiencies, preventing mistakes and fighting fraud, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Monday.

The U.S. healthcare system wastes between $505 billion and $850 billion every year, the report from Robert Kelley, vice president of healthcare analytics at Thomson Reuters, found.

"America's healthcare system is indeed hemorrhaging billions of dollars, and the opportunities to slow the fiscal bleeding are substantial," the report reads.

"The bad news is that an estimated $700 billion is wasted annually. That's one-third of the nation's healthcare bill," Kelley said in a statement.

"The good news is that by attacking waste we can reduce healthcare costs without adversely affecting the quality of care or access to care."

One example -- a paper-based system that discourages sharing of medical records accounts for 6 percent of annual overspending.

"It is waste when caregivers duplicate tests because results recorded in a patient's record with one provider are not available to another or when medical staff provides inappropriate treatment because relevant history of previous treatment cannot be accessed," the report reads.

Some other findings in the report from Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Reuters:

* Unnecessary care such as the overuse of antibiotics and lab tests to protect against malpractice exposure makes up 37 percent of healthcare waste or $200 to $300 billion a year.

* Fraud makes up 22 percent of healthcare waste, or up to $200 billion a year in fraudulent Medicare claims, kickbacks for referrals for unnecessary services and other scams.

* Administrative inefficiency and redundant paperwork account for 18 percent of healthcare waste.

* Medical mistakes account for $50 billion to $100 billion in unnecessary spending each year, or 11 percent of the total.

* Preventable conditions such as uncontrolled diabetes cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year.

"The average U.S. hospital spends one-quarter of its budget on billing and administration, nearly twice the average in Canada," reads the report, citing dozens of other research papers.

"American physicians spend nearly eight hours per week on paperwork and employ 1.66 clerical workers per doctor, far more than in Canada," it says, quoting a 2003 New England Journal of Medicine paper by Harvard University researcher Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.

Yet primary care doctors are lacking, forcing wasteful use of emergency rooms, for instance, the report reads.

All this could help explain why Americans spend more per capita and the highest percentage of GDP on healthcare than any other OECD country, yet has an unhealthier population with more diabetes, obesity and heart disease and higher rates of neonatal deaths than other developed nations.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said on Sunday that Senate Democratic leaders are close to securing enough votes to pass legislation to start reform of the country's $2.5 trillion healthcare system.

Castro's sister worked for the CIA

MIAMI – One of Fidel Castro's sisters says in a memoir released Monday that she collaborated with the CIA against her brother, starting shortly after the United States' failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.

Juanita Castro, 76, initially supported her brother's 1959 overthrow of the Batista dictatorship but quickly grew disillusioned. In a Spanish-language memoir published by Santillana USA and co-written by journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she says the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba persuaded her to meet a CIA officer during a trip to Mexico in 1961.

By then, her house had already become a sanctuary for anti-communists, and Fidel Castro had warned her about getting involved with the "gusanos," or worms, as those who opposed the revolution were called.

Castro says in the book, "My Brothers Fidel and Raul. The Secret Story," that she traveled to Mexico City under the pretense of visiting her younger sister Enma. There she also secretly met a CIA officer who identified himself as "Enrique" at the elegant Camino Real hotel.

A spokesman for the CIA in Langley, Va., declined to comment on Castro's account.

Castro said that during the hotel meeting, she expressed her concerns that those who supported Batista's overthrow but were not communists were being pushed out of the new government. Castro writes she agreed to help the CIA gather information but refused to accept money for her efforts and said she wanted no part in any violence.

"I want to be very clear that agreeing to collaborate with you does not signify that I will participate in any violent activity against my brother, nor any official in the regime," she told the agent. "This is my most important condition. And moreover, I would say it is the only condition."

"Enrique," whom Castro says she later learned was a CIA officer in Cuba named Tony Sforza, then asked her to smuggle messages, documents and money back into the country hidden in canned goods.

He told Castro she would receive information through shortwave radio communications. Castro chose a waltz and a song from the opera Madame Butterfly as the signals her handlers would use to let her know if they had information for her.

Castro said she remained on the island while her mother was alive, believing she was protected from the full wrath of her brother. Her mother died in 1963 and she fled Cuba the following year, eventually settling into a quiet life in Miami, where she ran a pharmacy until 2007 and is generally well regarded by other Cuban exiles.