Cuba's Human Rights

Worse Than Batista's?

Worse Than Miami's?

      Bruno Rodriguez, Cuba's Foreign Minister, made a pertinent statement this week on the eve of U. S. President Barack Obama's arrival on the island Sunday. Next Tuesday Obama will make a major speech at Havana's Grand Theater. The speech will include support for the island's anti-government dissidents that Cuba believes the United States should stop funding, encouraging and supporting. Yet, Cuba will televise the speech live to the entire island. Mr. Rodriguez said: "President Obama will have the opportunity to directly address the Cuban people. His speech will be televised live. Everyone can see his speech and everyone can form their own opinion on what he says." The U. S. media, intimidated by and subversive to Cuban-American extremists who dictate America's Cuban narrative, conveniently ignored those two indelible sentences because they didn't conform to the anti-Cuban narrative that saturates the United States.

          Even moderate U. S. media outlets, such as USA Today, employ only anti-Cuban Cuban-American journalists, such as Alan Gomez, as their prime reporters on Cuban issues. Impartial Cuban reporters are seemingly prohibited. Gomez's article from Miami prior to leaving to cover Obama's visit to Cuba is entitled "Obama's Cuba Visit Makes It Real." The rest of the article is the usual pro-Batista, anti-revolutionary rhetoric, but Gomez did add one fair sentence: "Trying to figure out the complexities and ironies of Cuba has been hard enough for me, A U.S.-born son of Cuban immigrants who has traveled to the island repeatedly for more than a decade." From his Miami base, Cuba permits Gomez to "repeatedly" fly back and forth between Miami and Havana, well knowing his subsequent articles in America's largest newspaper will be slanted strongly against Cuba. Yet, USA Today and the rest of the mainstream U. S. media are obligated to stress that Cuba is a closed society that always restricts negative journalism while tightly controlling its own propaganda machines. Of course, if that was so, Obama's speech Tuesday would not be broadcast live on Cuba television and anti-Cuban journalists for major U. S. outlets would not be allowed to "repeatedly" fly back-and-forth between Miami and Havana when Cuba well knows only anti-Cuban vitriol will result.

      Contrast, if you will, America's typical high-profile Cuban-American journalist Alan Gomez with Cuba's highest profile journalist, 28-year-old Cristina Escobar. She says, "Cuba journalists on the island have more freedom to tell the truth about the U. S. than U. S. journalists have to tell the truth about Cuba." You do not have to agree with her but you do need to know that she means precisely what she says. A truly brilliant news anchor on Cuban and regional television, she made headlines in Washington when she covered the last Vidal-Jacobson diplomatic session, especially when she fired six pertinent questions at Obama spokesman Josh Earnest at a crowded White House news conference. And then, in an array of Washington interviews, she repeatedly made this point: "The lies the U. S. media tell about Cuba hurts everyday Cubans the most." Again, you are free to dismiss her now famous quote, but you do need to know that she means it. Also, instead of lapping up whatever anti-Cuban propaganda readily spewing unchallenged in the U. S. media...from the likes of Alan Gomez, Jorge Ramos, Jose Diaz-Balart, Ana Navarro, etc., etc., etc...perhaps you should at least study what Cristina Escobar has to say and then simply decide who is telling the truth or who is closest to telling the truth. Cristina Escobar says, "Since the Batista leaders regrouped in the U. S. in 1959, the biggest threat to Cuba's hard-earned sovereignty has not been the economic and military might of the United States. Instead it has been the lies, the propaganda, that the U. S. media has spread about Cuba and its relations with the United States. The fact that Americans are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that truth is more important to the anti-Cuba extremists in the U. S. than all the military, CIA, and Congressional support combined. When bombing coastal peasants or bombing civilian airplanes is accepted by the U. S. media, than I think Americans have bigger problems than Cubans if Americans are afraid of Cuban-exile extremists."

Photo courtesy: Getty Images; caption courtesy: AP.

      The photo above and the caption that describes it directly coincided with other all-out efforts by the Batistianos and the U. S. government to recapture Cuba after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship in January of 1959. The image depicted above was in conjunction with multiple CIA-Batistiano assassination attempts against Fidel Castro as well as the 1961 Bay of Pigs military attack, the 1962 embargo designed to starve and deprive Cubans to induce them to rise up against Castro, the 1976 terrorist bombing of the child-laden Cuban civilian airplane that was heralded in the Miami media as "the biggest blow yet against Castro," and an unending string of U. S. congressional laws designed to destroy Cuba while also enriching and empowering a select few Cuban-Americans. Go back and study the historic photo and caption above showing U. S. military airplanes in Florida, starting in January of 1960, being used by the CIA to attack Cuba with "napalm-type bombs." U. S. tax dollars paid for those napalm-type bombs, not to mention the bombs that downed Cubana Flight 455 in 1976. Meanwhile, a lot of propaganda and an intimidated U. S. media routinely makes Cuba out to be the villain. The U. S. media, instead of reporting the news, has sanitized such things from the 1950s till today. Cristina Escobar, the high-profile young Cuban broadcaster, thinks that's wrong while, typically, Alan Gomez, USA Today's Miami-based Cuban expert who "repeatedly" flies to Cuba, seems intent on vilifying Cuba while sanitizing assaults on innocent Cubans, such as "napalm-type bombs" depicted above.

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