Are There Similar problems?
Pilar Montes knows much more than a little bit about journalism in Cuba and in the United States. Moreover, she's fair-minded in her judgments. This week she penned a major article, which originated on Havana Times.org, entitled: "Cuban Journalists Defend Their Right to Inform." It's an incisive, insightful, and important article because journalists everywhere...Cuba, the U. S., etc. -- have every right to inform and do so freely. Ms. Montes wrote about a journalism meeting in the Cuban city of Santa Clara in which representatives of the Plenary of the Cuban Journalists Association complained about governmental restrictions. Good for them and good for the Cuban government for simply being on hand to respond.
At that session in Santa Clara, both the Cuban journalists and the Cuban government agreed that the freer the Cuban press is, the better the Cuban people will be. And both sides confirmed that the state-controlled Cuban media has become much freer and balanced in listening to and publishing complaints from everyday Cubans. In the aforementioned article, Pilar Montes wrote: "Examples of the population annoyance fill our TV reports and the Letters to the Editor section which appears in the Friday edition of Granma." Granma is the leading newspaper in Cuba. Fair-minded journalists, such as Pilar Montes, are free to criticize the Cuban government and so are everyday Cubans via the state-controlled media. And they are now much freer to openly comment -- pro or con -- about advances by the Cuban government in opening up to common demands that deeply concern the people. Americans are not supposed to know that, but that's America's problem, not Cuba's -- a sovereign island that has enough problems of its very own. Uniqueness is often misguided because people in different countries are not so different in trying to navigate their everyday lives.
Karina Marron is an important journalist in Cuba. She is, in fact, the Assistant Director of Granma, the island's top media source. Instead of ignoring and not reporting on that anti-government journalism meeting in Santa Clara, Ms. Marron attended the session and answered all questions. Her main point: "Journalists on the island, like elsewhere, have a right and, I think, a duty to complain if they feel they are restricted from freely reporting the news as they see it. I agree. But understand that, in Cuba, we have a problem with foreign-based and foreign-funded anti-Cuban aspects filtering into if not usurping our media. So, from a societal standpoint the Cuban state has to respond to that. As our response has been more successful and, may I say, more understood, you journalists in Cuba have noticed the additional freedoms you have to perform your important work. You can criticize us, and then critique whether we respond to such criticism or not. In print publications and in radio and T-V shows, we strongly encourage the airing of legitimate complaints against the government and then we invite the complainants to follow up and see if we have responded correctly...or responded at all. So, yes, the state has made progress and, yes, we do have to make more."
An improved and improving Cuban media. Yes, no or maybe?
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Study the above Gallup Poll and you will see that Americans have an incredibly dismal view of their own U. S. media and that compunctious assessment is getting much more dismally with each passing day.
The recent purchase of the iconic Washington Post by Jeff Bezos highlights why the U. S. media is held in such low regard by Americans. Mr. Bezos, the Amazon founder, is currently worth $59.1 billion, which is growing about as fast as the media's reputation is plummeting. For decades the iconic Post was a liberal bastion and a journalistic beacon, with such democracy-loving revelations as the Watergate scandal that doomed President Nixon. As a lifelong conservative Republican, I treasured the integrity of the Post...until Bezos turned it into what I consider a propaganda machine that lobbies for his personal financial interests and political leanings. That, unfortunately, has come to typify the entire mainstream U. S. media -- print, radio and television, and online. It is all owned by billionaire individuals and billionaire corporations that take advantage of the media's monopolistic characteristics to incessantly propagandize in the interest of its billionaire owners. Those interests include sweet financial deals and monopolies readily available via having the resources to lobby politicians while also proselytizing their victims, everyday Americans, into not complaining...at least, not too awful much.
Prior to such things as greedy and politically-minded billionaires buying up the mainstream media in the United States, the sacrosanct news media felt obligated and compelled to fairly report the news even from a business standpoint because, supposedly, the best and fairest news would get the biggest readership or ratings and thus the most advertisement dollars. But that Walter Cronkite era is long gone and will never return. The U. S. media now has a billionaire monopoly that caters only to billionaires, certainly not to its readers or listeners or viewers, all of whom are considered propagandized pawns. And, without exaggerating one iota, a weak and biased media perhaps constitutes the greatest threat to the American democracy, a fact that the Founding Fathers seemed to realize 240 years ago, back in 1776.
The aforementioned article this week by Pilar Montes concerning Cuban journalists campaigning for more freedom on the island reminds me of Cristina Escobar, Cuba's brilliant 28-year-old broadcast journalist. She has made three significant journalistic visits to the United States -- one to California in 2014 and since then two more publicized trips to Washington. She not only made news and history by dominating a White House news conference with six pertinent questions directed at Josh Earnest, but she garnered some additional headlines with such frank and interesting comments as: "Cuba journalists have more freedom to tell the truth about the U. S. than U. S. journalists have to tell the truth about Cuba." Some top U. S. journalists -- such as Andrea Mitchell of NBC News -- respected Ms. Escobar's comments but, for the most part, both the U. S. media and propagandized Americans either ignored them or scoffed at them. Yet, the well-educated, superbly talented, and awesomely intelligent Ms. Escobar obviously and sincerely believes what she says. In fact, if she didn't she probably would be living in a $10 million mansion in Miami and also be the top broadcast anchor in America. That is not an hyperbolic assumption. Reliable sources report that Ms. Escobar, as fluent in English as she is in Spanish, has been offered anchoring jobs by at least two major U. S. networks not to mention what one source called "a veritable gold mine" if she would defect to Miami and denounce Cuba. As a Cuban journalist, of course, she doesn't live in a mansion nor does she have a gold mine, but she has integrity.
Cristina Escobar is Cuba's dynamic television news anchor. She also has, in English, a popular regional program. Now, concerning her recent and dynamic visits to the U. S. -- and the reputed offers she has received to entice her to defect to Miami or to anchor in New York -- if one day I tuned in the 6:30 P. M. evening news on NBC or CBS or ABC and see that she is the new anchor, I probably will alter some...but not all...of my views on U.S.-Cuba relations. By the same token, if she became an anchor on cable news programs I probably wouldn't know it because, unless there is major breaking news, I never watch even CNN because of the incredible saturation of Talking Head propagandists that insult even my meager IQ.
This Cubaninsider essay about hard-working journalists Pilar Montes, Karina Marron, and Cristina Escobar reminds me...as strange as it may seem...of the above photo. Yes, that's Linda Ronstadt. The photo was taken in the 1970s when she was the hottest and greatest pop singer on the planet -- in either English or Spanish. To this day in July of 2016, if truth be known, daily I go to YouTube to hear and see Linda Ronstadt sing her classics such as "Long Long Time," "Blue Bayou," "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," etc. It turned out, as I only learned recently, that when this photo was taken Linda, the pop superstar, was making her first trip to Cuba where she fell in love with the island. Linda, the Mexican-American girl from Tucson, on August 18, 2014 -- after she had retired from performing -- was interviewed by AZCentral about her love for Cuba and her hatred for such things as the anti-Cuban Cuban Adjustment Act that was easily rammed through the U. S. Congress. She said: "We allow Cubans to come in and say they are refugees. Well, in Cuba -- I've been there, you know -- people are fed, people are housed, people are clothed. There isn't violence in the streets." Then, I recently noticed online that Linda, in a 2003 interview published by City Pulse, said: "Cuba is an amazing country. I've been all over Latin America and it's the only Latin American country I've been in that didn't have armed troops on the streets, there weren't homeless people everywhere, and kids had school uniforms and had school books paid for and had their health care paid for. There's things going on in Cuba that we don't know about, and that's because of the Miami Cubans. It's a total propaganda device and they have bracketed this country with propaganda about Cuba, huge amounts of which are untrue." Those exact comments from Linda Ronstadt, still readily available online, were based on personal observations because, as America's top female pop singer from the late 1960s till deep into the 1980s, she traveled widely as a performer at sold-out concerts and, clandestinely, she also traveled to...the island of Cuba!!
This photo is very dear to me. It was taken in 1975 at a concert in Roanoke, Virginia. I was there, and I remember this moment. It shows Glenn Frey leading Linda Ronstadt back on stage for an encore. Glenn himself was a superstar in her band. He recently died and Linda wrote the heart-wrenching obituary in Time Magazine about his life. I wasn't a concert-goer, except when Ronstadt was close. I've read many articles and books about her, including her best-selling memoir. Anyone who knows me knows I still cherish her singing, especially via YouTube. But only this week, when someone pointed out the two aforementioned articles to me, did I know about Linda's love for Cuba. Thus, I believe that she will agree with me when I say that Cuba says a lot more about the United States of America than it says about Cuba.
Linda Ronstadt's observations about Cuba were based on her personal visits to the island beginning in the 1970s. Her comments remind me precisely why the powerful anti-Cuba lobby in the United States, with the felicitous help of the U. S. Congress, has mandated that everyday Americans for the past five decades have been the only people in the world without the freedom to visit Cuba. In other words, such visits as the freedom-loving Linda Ronstadt took might produce opinions of the island that differ from the propaganda Americans have been fed by self-serving anti-Cuba lobbyists all these years. And that's one reason why President Obama's ongoing brave and historic efforts to normalize relations with Cuba are so very important. Americans, like all other citizens of the world, deserve the freedom to visit Cuba so they can enjoy it or judge it for themselves. President Obama cannot erase all of the anti-Cuban and anti-American laws unleashed by Miami and Congress, but he has erased or weakened many of them. That's why more and more Americans can visit Cuba, and that includes celebrities such as Beyonce and Jay-Z {above} but also Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Dave Mathews, Vin Diesel and his Fast & Furious movie crew, Smokey Robinson, etc. In other words, as Linda Ronstadt opined, the United States, 240 years after it became a country, is better when it finally applies democratic principles to its Cuban policy.
And lastly:
This image is used courtesy of NBC. It was featured on that network's top newscast at 6:30 PM this week, July 5th. It was a heart-wrenching portion of a report entitled "City Under Siege." It concerned another typical day in the great American city of Chicago where dozens of people, including children playing in a park, were shot in the gun-crazed United States of America. There are people ensconced in the U. S. Congress who are extremely critical of many things but noncommittal about this prayerful sign.
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