Media Annals: The poison in American “news” reporting (Cuba/Newsweek)
Fidel and Raúl Castro: Still a thorn in the US ruling class’ side. All that foul play didn’t pay off as planned.
omission, the blockage of highly pertinent facts. What was left out of the story? Well, “minor” things like the unrelenting US embargo calculated to wreck the island’s economy, the onsite economic sabotage of industry and agriculture, and a long catalog of other crimes against Cuba, tantamount to a “kow-intensity war” that included the constant plotting to destabilize the Castro government and kill Fidel Castro himself. Incidentally, such things never stop. They are merely taken off momentarily off the front burner, mirroring political shifts in the political establishment of the US.
With a home public safely ignorant and brainwashed, the media and politicians can get away with anything, and they do, routinely. The pink elephant in the room —the obvious and irrefutable truth—can be safely ignored.—Patrice Greanville
EXHIBIT
Provided by Newsweek
March 3, 1980
(P. 39)
Castro’s Sea of Troubles
Crops are rotting in the fields. Cigar factories are closing. Industrial production is faltering and thousands of hard-pressed laborers cannot ind work. Cuba’s perpetually undernourished economy has taken another severe tum for the worse in past months and even President Fidel Castro has begun to acknowledge his country’s problems. “We are sailing in a sea of diiii-
culties,” he recently told the National Assembly of People’s Power. “We have been in this sea for some time and we will
continue in this sea. The shore is far away.”
[pullquote] Anything, no matter how low, to immunize the American mind against socialism or any ideological threat to the capitalist system. Still, isn’t it laughable that American journalists find just about any other economy lacking, the government corrupt or inept, and the system a disgrace, while their own country, the richest nation on Earth, allows its major cities to go bankrupt? [/pullquote]
Castro’s bleak imagery is appropriate. Cuba has endured repeated economic set-backs in the more than twenty years since
Castro ousted Fulgencio Batista, but the island has rarely seemed so close to financial chaos and social disorder. The black market is flourishing and street crime is on the increase. Although the Soviet Union continues to funnel $ 10 million into Cuba each day, the economy refuses to rally. Last week, NEWSWEEK obtained a copy of the speech Castro made to a closing session of the National Assembly. In his address, the Cuban leader acknowledged that the growth of the gross national product is declining, and that economic growth may tumble by as much as 50 per cent this year and warned that severe budget cuts may be necessary in housing and industrial construction.
The deepening crisis has prompted Castro to engineer the most sweeping Cabinet reshuffling since the revolution. Nine ministers, including all those holding economic posts, were ousted, as was the chief’ public prosecutor. As his Minister of the Interior, Castro appointed Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a fiercely loyal hard-liner who made a name for himself during the drive against “counter-revolutionaries” in the early 1960s. But the man who will directly oversee no fewer than four Cabinet portfolios, including Interior and Defense, is Castro himself. “That really shows you how serious the situation is,” said one Latin American diplomat in Central America.
Disease: Cuba’s current plight is largely due to the dismal yield of last year’s cash crops. A quarter of the tobacco harvest
was wiped out by disease-all major cigar factories have been forced to shut down until August at least-and sugar production fell more than 1 million tons short of the target. “Plant rot and blue rust teamed up against us,” Castro said in his speech.
The noxious blue mold apparently has spread in the fields for years. “It is an utter disaster,” added Luis Aguilar, professor of history at Georgetown University. “It is as if the French had left their vineyards to rot.”
Decay may be spreading into Cuban cities as well. Castro acknowledged that law and order were breaking down in Havana and said he would meet the challenge by expanding the police force and imposing tougher prison sentences. He also said, half jokingly, that he may send unemployed people to logging camps in Siberia-before they get the urge to cause trouble at home. Castro’s brother, Raul, Cuba’s First Vice President, recently charged that “laxity and indiscipline” were sweeping the country, and Fidel contended that existing labor laws protect “the delinquent, the bum, the absentee.”
Recent visitors to Havana report an outbreak of anti-Castro grafhti-most with the same message: “Better exploited under Batista than starving under Castro.” U.S officials ‘ say the number of Cuban “boat people” arriving in the United States is ten times higher than in the first six months of last year. An ever-growing number of Cubans have been breaking into foreign embassies and the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay pleading for asylum. So many “fence jumpers” have raced into the Peruvian and Venezuelan diplomatic compounds that the governments in Lima and Caracas have recalled their ambassadors from Cuba and the Venezuelans have chided Castro for failing to provide the “jumpers” safe passage to another country.
Success Stories: Cubans have been especially frustrated since relatives from the U.S. began visiting-often in designer jeans and expensive dresses. Last year, more than 100,000 Cuban-Americans came with their success stories. “We’ve got everything we want,” said one visitor. “How do you think my cousins feel when they have to stand in line just to buy rice and are on a waiting list to buy a refrigerator‘?” Comparisons like that can be dangerous, but Castro can hardly turn the affluent tourists away.
More than ever, Cuba needs their money.
FRED BRUNING with LARRY
ROHTER in Washington