Should American Taxpayers Help Fund Cuba’s Media?

Should American Taxpayers Help Fund Cuba's Media?
July 3, 2014 by Humberto Fontova

"Everything within the Revolution, nothing outside of it." (Fidel Castro
speech, June, 1961.)

"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against
the state." (Benito Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.)

In his famous speech on June 16, 1961 Fidel Castro, whose KGB-designed
jails and torture chambers at the time incarcerated one of every 19
Cubans for political "crimes," was warning the rest of his subjects how
they might stay out of them. In particular he was setting the boundaries
of "artistic freedom." If your prose or poetry or films or journalism
served the purposes of the totalitarian regime you were probably safe.
Otherwise…?

As usual, even with this declaration Fidel Castro was stealing, from the
declarations of his hero Benito Mussolini this time. Earlier he also
stole from his hero Adolf Hitler.

"Condemn me, it doesn't matter," declared Fidel Castro during the 1953
trial for his failed Moncada putsch. "History will absolve me."

"You may pronounce me guilty," declared Adolf Hitler during the 1924
trial for his failed Rathaus putsch. "But the eternal court of history
will absolve me."

Last week National Public Radio (lavished with over $ 4 billion by U.S.
taxpayers over the past decade) ran a week-long "special series" on—and
from—Cuba. Such was their propaganda value for the Castro regime, that
Cuba's own KGB-founded and mentored media gleefully ran some of them—and
in their pristinely unedited form.

Given Castro's quote above this should serve as quite a "compliment" to
NPR's producers.

That NPR has a soft spot for socialism should not be surprising,
however. After all, "Federal funding is essential to public radio's
service to the American public," explains NPR's own website.
"Elimination of federal funding would result in fewer programs, less
journalism…and eventually the loss of public radio stations."

NPR's brand of journalism came under fire most recently when Republican
Senators Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn sponsored a bill in 2011 to defund
the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. "Since 2001, the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, which funds programming for National Public Radio
and the Public Broadcasting Service, has received nearly $4 billion in
taxpayer money," explained Senator DeMint at the time. "There's simply
no reason to force taxpayers to subsidize liberal programming they
disagree with."

Liberal programming on the dime of unwitting conservative donors is bad
enough. Flat-out KGB-mentored propaganda on behalf of a
terror-sponsoring regime that murdered more political prisoners than
pre-war Hitler's, jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than
Stalin's and came closest of any in history to wantonly igniting a
thermo-nuclear war cranks up the offense several notches. Or should.

Even pinkos should be offended by NPR's latest infomercials on behalf of
the Castro-regime, if not by the content, then by the cartoonish and
unprofessional presentation of the propaganda. This week NPR's Morning
Edition host David Greene hosted a report from Cuba featuring
an interview with a Cuban "man-on-the-street":

"I was born in 1947, under capitalism," Landin says. "(Cuba) used to be
a pot of crickets. It was the saddest place on earth."

He wants to be sure we understand how Cuba was before the revolution.

"Have you been to Haiti? That's what Cuba used to look like. A few
people were rich, and everyone else was starving."

See Spot run. See Dick and Jane play. "Good grief, NPR!" Castro himself
might wince. "I know you mean well. And it's one thing to earn your
Havana bureau. But please, some subtlety and maturity would help. You
sound like Igor complimenting his master."

What makes their Castroite pamphleteering even worse is how NPR bills
itself as intrepid investigators who don't just report. "Great
storytelling and rigorous reporting," boasts the NPR intro page. "These
are the passions that fuel us (here at NPR)…But always we dig, question,
examine and explore. We never settle for obvious answers and predictable
stereotypes. We look to connect history and culture to breaking news."

Well, exactly how much "digging" would have been required by NPR's
intrepid investigative reporter David Greene (or his staff) to correct
this "rigorous" bit of "reporting"? Exactly how much "questioning" and
"examination" would have been required to obliterate one of the most
grotesque Castroite lies of the century—to "connect history" with the
truth, as NPR claims as its goal?

Not much. In fact pre-Castro Cuba enjoyed a higher-standard of living
than most of Europe, from which it attracted a flood of immigrants–to
say nothing of next door Haiti, whose residents often jumped on rafts
desperate to enter pre-Castro Cuba.

Think about that for a second, amigos: people used to jump on rafts and
take to the high seas trying to enter Cuba. Yet NPR would have us
believe Cuba was as poor as Haiti!

"One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle
class," found a report from The Geneva-based International Labor
Organization in 1957. "44 per cent of Cubans — a higher percentage than
Americans at the time— are covered by social legislation. Cuban workers
are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers.
The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for
workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives
66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per
cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent."

When no NPR "reporters" are within hearing range, Commies can be
extremely frank with each other. Early in the Cuban revolution, for
instance, Czech economist Radoslav Selucky visited Cuba and gaped: "We
thought Cuba was underdeveloped except for a few sugar refineries?!" he
wrote upon returning to Prague. "This is false. Almost a quarter of
Cuba's labor force was employed in industry where the salaries were
equal to those in the U.S.!"

The Castro brothers and Che Guevara converted a nation with a higher per
capita income than half of Europe, the lowest inflation rate in the
Western hemisphere, a huge influx of immigrants and whose unionized
workers enjoyed the 8th-highest industrial wages in the world into one
that repels Haitians. And this after being lavished with Soviet
subsidies that totaled almost ten Marshall Plans (into a nation of 6.4
million.) This economic feat defies not only the laws of economics but
seemingly the very laws of physics. One place where Cuban exiles agree
wholeheartedly with Castro and Che is regarding their exalted posts as
Third World icons. They certainly converted Cuba into a humdinger of a
Third World nation.

David Green has much to learn from one of NPR's other Cuba
correspondents Nick Miroff, who'd never attempt anything as crude as
Green's recent morning edition. Miroff, who also contributes to the
Washington Post, is married to the daughter of one of Castro's top KGB
protégés. The man who would have been Miroff's late father-in-law,
Manuel Piniero, founded and headed the Castro regime's secret police and
international terror agency the Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI.)
As often happens to top players in his profession, (Yezhov, Yagoda,
Beria in the mother country) Piniero himself was offed in 1998 after his
usefulness to the Castros expired. Not that you'd guess any of Miroff's
background (and what might be influencing his NPR and Washington Post
"reporting") from the Washington Post and NPR bios of their valued
Latin American correspondent.

Just thought you should know.

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