Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo in Translating Cuba:
Down With the Embargo, Long Live the Embargo
Graphics by El Sexto
The New York Times is not in favor or against the American embargo of the Cuban government. The New York Times is simply in favor of what in every circumstance is most convenient to the Castro regime.
So it was that the New York Times just published this recycled editorial where they ask for an end to the embargo for the 1959th time, even going beyond American law (they are like frogs in the Fidelista fable, demanding of the White Heron that governs at coups of presidential resolution.
So, in addition, the New York Times in a second act to its distracting editorial, opened its plural debate pages to the one thousand and 959 Cubanologists: and so dissolved all the attention to not speak of what is most important now (and has been for two years), Olympianically omitting the presence in the United States of the witness to a double State murder on the part of the Raul and Fidel regime.
In effect, Angel Carromero is in American territory. However, the last reference on the New York Times to this criminal case of the Castro regime was from last year. The complaint of the Payá-Acevedo family, the complicity of the Spanish judiciary and executive with this announced assassination, the violations and mockery of those uniformed in olive-green on the little Island of the Infamous: none of this is Newyorktimesable. They love only the embargo because they know it works like an engine of little lies.
And because of this I don’t have one ounce of respect for the great media. They are killing machines in exchange for majestic salaries. I prefer the tiny voices of the nobodies. The almost anonymous biographies of the redeemers and their blogs with zero commentaries in every post.
So they killed Harold Cepero and Oswaldo Payá, martyrs to a perverse country where a perpetual power stones you and manipulates you to death with impunity. The Cuban Interior Ministry killed them both on Sunday, 22 July 2012, like two nobodies who are now barely doubtful statistics for the Ph.D.-holding experts of the New York Times. In this Manhattan edifice, so chilling in its supposed transparency, I say: Fuck you, New York Times.
But, of course, the debate of our exile, historic or recently arrived, follows the rhyme of the New York Times. Some say: lift it… Other say: keep it… and the arguments in both cases were conceived decades ago by the genocidal hierarchs from Havana.
What is laughable about this debate between dinosaurs is that it keeps the commanderesque mummy of Fidel alive and kicking: the dictator makes us dance the motherfuckers’ conga every time his cadaverous cojones come out.
Cubasummatum est.
The serious anti-embargo people all know their argument is a crock, but that’s what they’ve got and they’ll keep using it. The New York Times, for instance, is NOT clueless, just pushing its agenda by hook or by crook, as always. There’s a LOT more bad faith than genuine ignorance, certainly as one moves up the chain of influence–and among serious players, it’s pretty much all bad faith…unless it’s worse.
The NYT is simply protecting its creature, its Frankenstein, as it always has and always will. The Herbert Matthews business was neither accident nor fluke; it was simply par for the course–the same course that had enabled Walter Duranty’s pro-Stalin propaganda. After Duranty, if the NYT had had any decency, not to mention honor, it would have made DAMN sure that it never lent itself to anything pro-totalitarian, EVER, but obviously that’s not what happened–and again, that was no accident. I keep thinking of the story of the scorpion and the frog, because it fits the NYT so well: it is perverse to the core, and it will always act according to its nature.