I thought about writing about The Today Show’s puffy hagiography of life in modern Cuba…

…but I figured nobody could talk Cuba like Val Prieto.

If you are a Cuban living in Cuba, you have no voice. The Cuban government sees to that.

When you are a Cuban living in exile here in the states – regardless of whence you came – you, like every other American living in freedom, have a voice. But, no one listens. The Media sees to that.

So regardless of how sane your argument is, regardless of how reasonable you are, how verifiable your facts are or how absolutely right you are, the MSM – and by default those that get their news from same – dont really care about what you have to say or what you have experienced. The minute any Cuban crosses the Gulfstream, that voice that has been supressed for so many years becomes like that proverbial tree in the forest that falls. It make a sound, but there’s no one around to listen.

Prieto and his co-bloggers gut NBC’s myopic, oh-so-convenient “coverage” point-by-point, ethical blind spot by ethical blind spot, butt-smooch by butt-smooch, one context-free claim after another, to a devastating conclusion.

The concern is that with the death of fidel castro, so comes the death of his revolution. And the only way to keep that revolution alive, in a post-castro world, is to lionize the bearded tyrant. Barrage the world with the “greatness” of Cuba’s healthcare. Shove the “100% literacy rate” down the world’s throat. Express solidarity with anti-Americanism by making fidel castro, clearly the poster boy of said anti-Americanism, into a David that beat the Goliath to his North.

fidel castro once said that history would absolve him. Yet the only way to do that, given the thousands upon thousands of deaths he’s responsible for, given Cuba’s dismal human rights record, given the revolution’s ruination of a nation, a culture and a people, is to rewrite history. To make the world forget the paredon. To make the world forget crowded Cuban gulags. To make the world forget all the deaths at sea of those whose only hope was to live in freedom.

What we are seeing lately, as the Cuban government manipulates truth, as the world media sheepishly give in to the whims and demands of said government, as the world ignores the inhumanity of the Cuban regime, is the creation of a fictional absolution, fidel castro’s absolution, from thin air.

Read the whole thing, and ask yourself – “why did NBC go there now?”

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Culture War, Democrat Party, History And Its Making, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.