MALA: Cuba: A Half-Century of Distorted News and Counting...
Landau, Saul
MAY/JUNE 2008 Media accuracy mala on Latin aMerica www.mediaaccuracy.org Cuba: A Half-Century
of Distorted News and
Counting . . .
By Saul landau S ince january 1959, nearly...
...The few who remained on left a basis for a mass about the sec movement against ond grievance...
...Most post-1959 news stories, Few reporters tried to explain how the Cuban Revolution survived half a century of unrelenting hostility from its interventionist and powerful neighbor...
...show a lack of interest in understanding the realities of the revolutionary island and in interpreting events with some sense of symmetry...
...Cuba considered those arrested “traitors who could be prosecuted under a 1999 law that punishes people for assisting the economic embargo” (David Gonzalez, The New York Times, April 4, 2003...
...one in order to be close hood of revolutionaries of the generation that began with Moncada and included those who joined in subsequent years...
...support for that corrupt and brutal regime, portraying Fidel as a democrat who followed a long line of Latin American revolutionaries...
...MAY/JUNE 2008 Media accuracy mala on Latin aMerica www.mediaaccuracy.org Cuba: A Half-Century of Distorted News and Counting . . . By Saul landau S ince january 1959, nearly half a century An evil yet intriguing dictator clung to power ago, U.S...
...standards should prevail for political behavior everywhere...
...intelligence sources seem to have learned much, if anything, from Cuba’s top generals or Politburo members...
...Did the president hope to incite Cubans to rebel...
...The typical reportFlorida dropped er, however, pursued the leaflets and inherent evil, weakness grenades on Cuba, es, and logical contradictions in Castro’s persona some reporters and discourse...
...Laura Berguist of Look also Newsweek and one from Time said ran sympathetic features, as did Castro had made impressive gains in Georgie Anne Geyer of the Chicago health care and education, but had Sun-Times until she morphed into a deprived islanders of free speech, supreme Castrophobe...
...Cuba violated the Monroe Doctrine,” he snapped...
...The irony is that U.S...
...In 1960, a State Department memo insisted, “The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship...
...What a sense of humor he has...
...Interest exporting revoSection in Havana lution and had has concentrated its committed the efforts on cultivating cardinal sin of “dissidents” rather expropriating than providing WashU.S...
...The policy became personalized: Castro had to pay for his misbehavior...
...After the revolution triumphed, Lee Lockwood’s photojournalism for Life marked a second exception in which facts placed in context emerged from the stories...
...I recall several reporters asking me in the early 1960s whether Fidel had really belonged to the Communist Party before he declared himself a “Marxist-Leninist” in early 1961 or whether he had cut a secret deal with the Soviets long before he marched triumphantly into Havana in 1959...
...press, and politics—as if such vir-While most early reporting cen-tues existed before the revolution...
...Hillary Clinton has already sworn not to even talk to Cuba until she sees progress...
...Cubans, even those disgusted with their government, shake their heads with incredulity at such good wishes...
...counter-revolution...
...hemisphere by The U.S...
...Nor did they bother reading about it...
...policy has remained consistent...
...Big media journalists pursued “the story,” but ary triumph, Castro allowed the not its context...
...The United States had a vendetta against Cuba, and its leader had to receive appropriate punishment...
...Bush’s speech, further, implies a far more insidious intent...
...the government...
...They exchange formalities with Foreign Relations Ministry bureaucrats, but when they speak about “hard-liners,” they have little notion of what this means...
...Yet the State Department includes Cuba on its list of “terrorist nations” each year...
...John Mc-Cain remarked in February that “it’s naive to think you can sit down and have unconditional talks with a person [Raúl Castro] who has [been] part of a government that has been a state sponsor of terrorism not only in the hemisphere but throughout the world...
...In 1974, Dan Rather photographer Lockwood to spend sat next to me en route to Havana, quality time with him...
...ington with accuBy 1991, the So rate information and viet Union had analysis...
...You have the power to shape your own destiny,” he exhorted...
...He carried yet critical and sympathetic por-an expensive leather briefing book, trait of a struggling revolutionary “prepared for Mr...
...They bonded with a common faith in goals and in Castro as a leader whom they believed had the will and astuteness to persevere without violating basic principles or the common ethical credo that revolved around sovereignty and social justice...
...intelli history—the wars for independence during the 1860s and 1890s, the revolution of 1932—they don’t comprehend Castro’s and other Cuban leaders’ seeming obsession with national independence and social justice...
...Pulitzer Prize–winning author Andres Oppenheimer’s Castro’s Final Hour (1992) enlarged the meaning of the words “final” and “hour...
...the United States...
...counterparts...
...the Cuban Revolution survived half a century of This should not surprise readers familiar with unrelenting hostility from its interventionist and the equally unrevealing journalism on revolu-powerful neighbor...
...properties...
...government and the media reality...
...A great uncle claimed him, and a movement developed to keep him in the United States, despite the fact that his very fit father wanted him and had all the law on his side...
...Indeed, some of those who defended the keeping of the now famous Elián González, the boy whose mother fled Cuba on a raft and drowned, actually believed that Castro’s power included his ability to exercise mind control over Cuban children...
...Attorney General Janet Reno ultimately applied the obvious rationale: “Children belong to parents...
...ceptions in each case shined beacon lights on Both the U.S...
...He has written 14 books and made 50 films...
...Huh...
...Rather by CBS leader coping with the immense News research department...
...At the trials, 12 other dissidents, including some of the most articulate, revealed they had infiltrated 0 the group as agents of state security and testified against their erstwhile comrades...
...election, hoping for “the Cuban people...
...As bombs ex-Cuban government was “so uptight” and “paranoid” about the United States...
...companies the island depended on U.S...
...They did wanted to know so by ignoring levels of revolutionary, anti-liber why the Cuban al consensus within the government was Cuban leadership and “so uptight” and focusing attention on the myth that only one “paranoid” about man mattered...
...Presto, the U.S...
...The New York Times, Washington Post, and the major networks seem to overlook this editorials, op-eds, and “in-depth” reports reminded readers, listeners, and viewers that Cuba was a Communist, totalitarian dictatorship that routinely violated human rights...
...In 1957 Herbert Matthews, like John Reed in Russia and Edgar Snow in China, wrote front-page stories on Fidel Castro’s guerrilla band in Cuba’s eastern mountains...
...Few news reports mentioned these basic policy premises as the first George Bush signed the 1992 Torricelli Bill, which increased U.S...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS mala for Castro’s government to fall apart...
...Noticwhile simultaneously warding ing my eagerness, he offered me the off his aggressive neighbor to the portfolio...
...Punish Cubans to promote their own future well-being...
...I asked him if revolution...
...Inside, two thin clips from north...
...In films making five TV in Cuba from some sanity In 2008, Bush smugly refuses to speak to the the 1960s through the and logic will Cuban government...
...government had moved the proverbial goalposts...
...The subject of terrorism emerges as a dramatic example of double standards...
...Brian Latell retired in 1998, after serving four years as director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence, the highest-ranking analytic position for that region in the U.S...
...This might mean, what...
...economic pressure on the island...
...During the Cold War, reporters axiomatically labeled Cuba a Soviet pawn in the eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny...
...discrepancy...
...In 2006, a disappeared...
...arms control and disarmament adviser Paul Warnke (1977– 79) chuckled when I asked him the question in 1980...
...what grievances exist...
...Somehow, he felt, these measures would turn Cubans against their government—as if despair caused by the United States could motivate a pro-U.S...
...For liberals, Draper and planes from made the most coherent case...
...Cuba had its transition, but in Washington no one seemed to notice...
...and he could tell me how the Castro gov he distinguishes dis ernment had sidents from Cuban settled claims state security agents...
...Not only did they not know U.S.-Cuban history but they shared the assumption that U.S...
...He said he personally didn’t worry about that, or as well...
...The stories in leading newspapers and TV and radio news outlets emphasized Cuba’s economic failings, prevailing poverty, and lack of freedom...
...His articles where he would interview Castro for and book, Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s a CBS special (Castro, Cuba, and the Fidel, remain the most objective USA), which I directed...
...tered around the March 1959 exe-Rather, in his first stand-up from cutions of repressive Batista regime Havana, reported in his urgent officials and the length of Castro’s breathy style that while Castro had speeches (Lockwood called him Cu-made significant strides in improvba’s living newspaper), few under-ing Cubans’ health and education stood that the natural course of the levels, Cubans had no access to a free NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS mala press...
...1980s, I learned something about the strong magically find But the U.S...
...Cuba has not launched a single recorded terrorist mission against the United States...
...Barack Obama has said he’ll talk to the Cuban government...
...reporters arm themselves before traveling to the island on assignment...
...Without knowing Cuban friends...
...territory—or swearing to stop punching the United States in the fist with its face...
...Most journalists who “drop in” to do quick reports on Cuba don’t talk to the top leaders...
...Few bothered to ask what Cuba actually did to threaten U.S...
...None asked when in Cuba’s nearly 500-year history had the island’s citizens enjoyed “traditions” of free speech, press, and politics...
...Its authors advocated U.S...
...Nothing changed...
...He’s Cuba caused still waiting for it to instability in the materialize...
...Few reporters have developed relations of confidence with any of the hundreds of thousands of members of the loyal fraternity throughout the island who actually mean patria o muerte (homeland or death) when they shout the slogan at rallies...
...confiscated and In 2003, Cuba offered terms to charged 75 dissiU.S...
...nor could they practice free speech or politics...
...presidential election, hoping some sanity and logic will magically find their way into the White House...
...Does Bush want Cubans to rebel, and does he actually think its army would shoot its citizens...
...Bush enacted measures to hurt Cubans in their daily lives, barring them from seeing their relatives and limiting the amount of remittances their families could send...
...The reason given by the right-wing media and members of Congress for keeping the child: returning Elián to Cuba would mean delivering him to Castro—well-known as the father of all Cuban children...
...and planes from Florida dropped “Betrayal,” charged historian Theleaflets and grenades on Cuba, some odore Draper (in his 1962 and 1965 reporters wanted to know why the books), arguing that Castro had de ceived many people by As bombs charming them, making them think that behind exploded his iron, revolutionary throughout will stood a sentimental liberal, Western intellecHavana in 1960 tual...
...Relinquishing its naval base on U.S...
...He emphasized the brutality of Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship and U.S...
...with most of the He looked down...
...U.S...
...government support and thus relinquished any basis for broad appeal...
...government pretexts for anti-Cuban policies...
...Every four years, Cubans wait for a U.S...
...The narrowness and skewing of reporting will hardly surprise close observers of contemporary Cuba, nor will it shock the few journalists who have penetrated the veneer of stupid questions with which most U.S...
...diplomat in Havana...
...After the revolutionploded throughout Havana in 1960 revolution had turned socialist...
...Over four decades, media stars and hacks alike have, like parrots, repeated U.S...
...el Fisgón MAY/JUNE 2008 mala Uninformed readers could well conclude from stories that only one person lived on that island just south of the Florida Keys and that Castro had won his place in the Guinness Book of World Records for length of time spent disobeying the United States...
...Latell Every four years, Castro on his first visit never went to Cuba, nor Cubans wait for a to Washington...
...I nations whose try not to think of properties it had that...
...Occasionally, positive stories tions in Russia and China, although notable ex-emerged, but these were rare exceptions...
...mass media have reflected the through his repressive efficiency...
...The United States targeted Cuba in thousands of terrorist acts, including hundreds of assassination attempts against Castro...
...Few reporters views of the U.S...
...The media reported the story, but didn’t draw the obvious conclusion: Castro had already exported the vast majority of dissidents to the United States...
...and returned him to Cuba, thus incurring the wrath of Fox News and the rest of the rightwing media...
...His latest book is A Bush and Botox World (AK Press, 2007) and his newest award-winning film is We Don’t Play Golf Here, available on DVD via round worldproductions@ gmail.com...
...presidential supported Batista, but didn’t claim to speak about...
...Castro retired in February...
...After the surprising Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, government offices in Washington featured routine office bets on how many weeks it would take mala Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies Fellow...
...measures “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government...
...After Castro’s 2006 illness, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured Cubans that “you must know that you have no greater friend than the United States of America...
...It forged close military ties with the Soviet Union...
...government and sys-tried to understand—much less explain—how tematically misreported the Cuban Revolution...
...Few reporters I met in the 1960s or thereafter knew anything beyond a bare sketch of Cuban history...
...diplomat in HaCuba had vana told me he spent ceased to export most of his work even most of its day “servicing dissi sugar, let alone dents...
...Cuba lifting its embargo on the United States...
...In 49 years, neither reporters nor U.S...
...Ike had did he meet any of the people he speculates U.S...
...Former U.S...
...Oppenheimer even claimed that the execution of Cuban general and Angolan war hero Arnoldo Ochoa for narco-trafficking had dents—supposedly independent journalists, librarians, and political activists—with conspiring with James Cason, the top U.S...
...interests...
...In April 1959, President Eisenhower invented a lame excuse (he said illness, but played golf) to avoid meeting with gence community...
...I could problems of underdevelopment barely wait to see its contents...
...government doesn’t consider it ties that held together their way into the necessary to know any the brother-and sister- White House...
...How this would be achieved was not made clear, except that the president also addressed the Cuban armed forces, and suggested portentously: “When Cubans rise up to demand their liberty . . . you’ve got to make a choice: Defend a disgraced and dying order by using force against your own people,” he lectured Cuba’s military and police, or “embrace your people’s desire for change...
...She called a SWAT team in to liberate the child from his great uncle et al...
...They still serve as a vessel through which Cuba’s security forces gain the upper hand against their U.S...
Vol. 41 • May 2008 • No. 3
