Media Slander Campaign against Cuba

Dec 5, 2016

Since November 28^th, the media have devoted a lot of space to Fidel Castro’s death, highlighting the celebrations in Miami. They spouted a flood of hateful prejudice, lies and stupidities.

Thus Castro was only “a bloody dictator,” and Cuba “a prison.” The media widely quoted well-known oppositionists and supposed specialists capable of repeating for fifty years anti-Castro propaganda.

What the media ignored was the United Nations’ ranking of countries’ human development. If it had done so, it would have had to admit that Cuba, a small underdeveloped country which was led by gangsters up to 1959, today ranks 67 out of 188 countries in the world, despite the U.S. embargo since the revolution, despite the end of the aid furnished by the Soviet Union. Cuba is even 33^rd in life expectancy and 30^th in education. It would have been more honest, but too much for the partisan media, to show the large crowds turning out to see Fidel Castro’s ashes pass by. They didn’t show up because there was a rifle pointed at their backs.

This is not to deny that there is a dictatorial regime in Cuba, but we should know what yardstick to use to measure it. Haiti, the island neighbor of Cuba, is called a democracy by the same people who call Castro a dictator. In Haiti, the workers suffer from hunger; hurricanes are transformed into catastrophes by a decaying state apparatus; and cholera, which is unknown in Cuba, follows floods. In Haiti, a president has just been elected. Three fourths of the population didn’t bother to turn out, and the results are in fact disputed by the powerful. But the U.S. government and the pretended international community shows this operation in a democratic light, because the capitalists are free to exploit Haiti.

And it’s a fact that they haven’t been able to do the same thing in Cuba for decades, during which time, Cuba was a thorn in the side of the powerful and their hired journalists.