Mainstream Media Manufactures Narrative of US Benevolence Towards Cuba

by @PeppeMatt

In this Aug. 31, 2016 photo, passengers of JetBlue flight 387 holding a United States, and Cuban national flags, pose for photos in front of the plane transporting U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, at the airport in Santa Clara, Cuba. JetBlue 387, the first commercial flight between the U.S. and Cuba in more than a half century, landed in the central city of Santa Clara on Wednesday morning, re-establishing regular air service severed at the height of the Cold War. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

In this Aug. 31, 2016 photo, passengers of JetBlue flight 387 holding a United States, and Cuban national flags, pose for photos in front of the plane transporting U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, at the airport in Santa Clara, Cuba. JetBlue 387, the first commercial flight between the U.S. and Cuba in more than a half century, landed in the central city of Santa Clara on Wednesday morning, re-establishing regular air service severed at the height of the Cold War. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)

In February, Cuban baseball stars and brothers Lourdes and Yulieski Gourriel left the national team in the Dominican Republic in order to pursue careers in Major League Baseball. It was widely reported, from the official Communist Party newspaper Granma to regional and national news outlets. The coverage certainly represents a change from some years ago, when the issue would have been considered taboo, but was unremarkable considering the progression of Cuban society and media since then.

But for New York Times editorial writer Ernesto Londoño the incident represented a dramatic emergence of free expression in Cuba, which, he argues, has been brought about only by the Obama administration’s change in policy toward the island.

The move by the Gourriel brothers was not a surprise inside or outside of Cuba. Rumors that Yulieski’s days were numbered with the national team were reported as early as June 2015 on Cuban blogs and shared on social media by Cubans.

While the Cuban government allows its players to compete in foreign sports leagues, the U.S. government does not permit Cubans to obtain visas due to the embargo. Consequently, Cubans seeking to play in MLB must establish residency in a third country and declare they do not intend to return to Cuba.

The decision to play in MLB is literally a decision to abandon one’s country. Granma’s story noted that the Gourriel brothers abandoned their hotel “in frank attitude of handing themselves over to the merchants of hired, professional baseball.” Londoño, however, makes the official line sound significantly more hostile in his translation, saying the brothers were criticized for “surrendering to mercenaries” of for-profit professional baseball.  

Londoño’s political bias is most salient when he calls Cuba “the most repressive country in the hemisphere.” Similar right-wing propaganda has been used for decades against the progressive government for challenging U.S. political and economic control by “the threat of a good example.”

Since the late 1950s, the U.S. government has sponsored client states throughout the hemisphere ruled by military dictatorships who eliminated political opposition, clergy, students and peasants with death squads whose bloody campaigns reached genocidal levels in countries like Guatemala and El Salvador.

In Londoño’s native Colombia, the government and its affiliated paramilitaries kill hundreds of labor and human rights activists annually and dispossess tens of thousands more. In the last two weeks alone, Telesur reports four activists have been killed. With nearly six million internally displaced persons, Colombia is second in the world behind only Syria.

In Cuba, on the other hand, political disappearances and killings are unheard of since the Revolution assumed power in 1959. Nor is there even one single refugee from violence.

In his opinion piece “Pushing the Boundaries of Free Speech in Cuba,” Londoño cites Cuban journalists lamenting the state of their country’s baseball league in the wake of the Gourriel brothers incident, and questioning whether Cuban youths are apolitical, as evidence of a trend driven by U.S. policy:

American critics of the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Cuba have called the shift in policy a failure by focusing on how rigid the socialist government has remained. They’re missing something important: The new relationship has done much to diminish the culture of fear and obedience the state has long used to control its citizens. For years, those who criticized the government paid a high price and were branded as traitors, but today Cubans from a broader cross-section of society are speaking out with less fear.”

This statement contains several spurious claims. First, that the Cuban government has remained “rigid.” Under President Raúl Castro, the Communist Party Congress decided to reform its economic model. Since millions of Cuban participated in nationwide debates in 2007, the government has deliberately implemented consensus reforms that emerged from this process. In 2012, Castro expressed a desire to adapt to present challenges “without haste.”

Second, the claim Cuba has a “culture of fear and obedience” is clearly ideologically driven. Londoño doesn’t provide any examples to substantiate this allegation. It is taken for granted this is how Communist governments behave. Violence has never been a tool of population control by the Cuban Revolution. And it is not clear who allegedly paid a “high price.” It would be impossible to name even a single person who paid the ultimate price of his life.

Lastly, after failing to establish that the political culture he describes ever actually existed, Londoño argues that culture has now changed — thanks to the U.S. policy shift under the Obama administration.

Magnets for sale decorate a tourist shop, one showing an image of U.S. President Barack Obama smelling a cigar, at a market in Havana, Cuba, Monday, March 16, 2015. U.S. and Cuban officials are meeting Monday in last-minute closed door negotiations in Havana, in hopes of restoring full diplomatic relations before the Summit of the Americas in April. The magnet in the bottom row, second from left, reads in Spanish: "Here, nobody gives up," a popular quote attributed to Cuba's late revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos.

Magnets for sale decorate a tourist shop, one showing an image of U.S. President Barack Obama smelling a cigar, at a market in Havana, Cuba, Monday, March 16, 2015. U.S. and Cuban officials are meeting Monday in last-minute closed door negotiations in Havana, in hopes of restoring full diplomatic relations before the Summit of the Americas in April. The magnet in the bottom row, second from left, reads in Spanish: “Here, nobody gives up,” a popular quote attributed to Cuba’s late revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos.

This is a non sequitur. Yes, the U.S. and Cuban governments started the normalization process in December 2014. And subjects that were once taboo are now discussed more openly in 2016. But that does not mean the former has any connection to the latter, much less that there is a causal relationship.

Cubans unsurprisingly reject a narrative that puts the United States at the center of the changes in their politico-economic system. Juan Manuel Alvarez, a computer sciences engineer in Havana, disputed the idea that Granma’s publication of the Gourriel brothers departure had anything to do with encouraging Cubans to test the limits of free expression.

“For a long time in the country, internal problems have been discussed with much more freedom, and that is not at all related to December 17, 2014 [the bilateral announcement of normalization between the two countries],” Alvarez said in an email. “The whole dynamic that Londoño refers to, in which the blogs and regional journalism web sites like the Vanguardia are included, has been driven by the Communist Party itself and its main leaders, because before there definitely existed a strong control over all that.”

According to the imperialist narrative, the Cuban government is not capable of representing the political aspirations of its people. So any positive development — real or perceived — is attributed instead to the American government, who do represent the political aspirations of Cubans.

But the assumption of American benevolence towards Cuba is belied by the historical record, which shows American officials wanted to create “disenchantment and disaffection” among the “majority of Cubans” who supported the Revolution.

“Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba,” wrote U.S. diplomat Lester Mallory in a secret April 1960 memo, “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

The embargo and isolation of Cuba are complementary tactics in an economic war waged on the country for more than half a century. The United States government and media must acknowledge that U.S. policy towards Cuba has never had noble intentions; on the contrary, it was illegal and immoral.

And it cannot be retroactively justified by any alleged benefits. Change, to the extent that Cubans want it, should and will be brought about Cubans themselves, without any involvement of the United States.

The most benevolent thing the U.S. government can do for Cuba is to cease hostilities against the country. The normalization process is only a partial, first step in that direction. It must also be followed by the complete termination of the embargo; the end of the occupation of Cuban territory and return of the Guantanamo Naval Base to Cuba; termination of financial support for domestic political opposition; and payment of reparations for the hundreds of billions in damages caused by the embargo and decades of terrorism.

A recent editorial in Granma laid out the principles by which mutual engagement between the two governments should take place:

Cuba affirms its will to advance relations with the United States, on the basis of the observance of the principles and intentions of the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by the officials of the State and Government of the region, which include the absolute respect for its independence and sovereignty, the inalienable right of all states to choose their political, economic, social and cultural system without interference of any kind; equality and reciprocity.

Cuba has shown they are willing to move beyond decades of the U.S. government’s interference, subversion, terrorism and aggression against them. So far, the Obama administration has shown no willingness to oblige. Media narratives that take for granted an American role in Cuba’s evolution encourage the U.S. government to continue its meddling.

The notion that the U.S. government’s new relationship will bring about positive societal changes in Cuba should be disposed of, along with the imperialist mindset that assumes such an outcome is even possible. U.S. policy should be judged by the extent which the U.S. government stops trying to influence politics in Cuba and lets the island develop independent of any outside pressure.

 

Originally published on Just the Facts.

Content posted to MyMPN open blogs is the opinion of the author alone, and should not be attributed to MintPress News.

Comments

  1. There has NEVER been anything “benevolent” about US treatment of the Cuban people. The Maine incident was a false flag operation to justify a war to take Cuba from Spain. US corporations IMMEDIATELY moved into Cuba, using wealthy plantation owners to extract sugar and other products from Cuba while using what amounted to slave labor. Workers were shot for leaving their jobs, there was no rural education or health care except for the rich.

    Fidel Castro went to Washington, under the delusion that the United States was pro-democracy and might help the people of Cuba to obtain decent treatment. Neither Eisenhower or anyone else would see him and he went to the ONLY source of help available – Russia.

    Since the winning of the civil war in 1959, the United States has done everything possible, short of invasion by US troops, to destroy Cuba. The Bay of Pigs invasion was not stopped by the Cuban military – but by Cuban farmers and townspeople with pitchforks and machetes.

    Reply

    • “TAPATIO” is a NAZ! on this webpage who wants to “ERADICATE JUDAISM.” He considers Jews like JILL STEIN and her family to be part of a “3000 year Criminal Cartel.” His comments are entirely political and have NO VALUE to anyone reading his posts. He is what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called a member of neo-NAZ!, violent extremist organizations and repeatedly posts complete lies and half truths on this website.

      Reply

    • A “false flag” operation is an attack on your people or allies to justify an attack on someone else by blaming them. However, the Maine incident – during the CUBAN uprising against Spain – is still speculative and was likely an accident, and not either an operation by Spain or the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(ACR-1)

      Really TAPATIO, if you’re going to continue with your works of fiction, be flashier.

      In either event the end of the Spanish Empire – eventually – enabled independence for Cuba, the Philippines, etc. It’s fine with me, if “U.S. interests” NEVER move into Cuba. They’re doing SO WELL with no tourism from the USA and no investment, thanks to their own illegal nationalization of businesses from abroad.

      Reply

      • The Maine Incident occurred ONLY because the US wished to take over the Cubans’ struggle and use Cuba as a grocery factory. Which it did – IMMEDIATELY after winning the war.

        Reply

        • The Maine Incident occurred because a boiler blew up. Yellow Journalists of the day stoked the fires of anger that led to a war. “Remember the Maine; and to He!! with Spain.”

          There is no evidence that the USA blew up its own ship – only that it seized on the unproven allegation to start a war.

          Reply

          • What possible difference could that make? It still amounts to a false-flag “accident” instead of “incident”.

  2. So is there anything “benevolent” about the Cuban regime for its own people? Free medical care in exchange for your freedom and democracy?

    And how has the Castro regime exhibited “benevolence” to the USA? Sounds like MintPressNews ASSUMES that the only nation to be considered benevolent is the USA. That’s always true of the Far Left and it is their undoing.

    Reply

  3. “Fringe Left Press tries to find a way to attack America for doing what it asked America to do and opening up to Cuba.” Yes, MintPressNews IS an Iranian-backed Shi’ite website in Minneapolis. Just like Iran, MPN holds the view that “it’s America’s fault.”

    Reply

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