The “Today” show, that is, never ends with its adulation for fidel castro’s Cuba.
Gina Garcia, a researcher and booker for the show, blogs today about last week’s broadcast from Cuba, complete with a picture of her and friend eating ice cream in front of a large banner displaying the image of ernesto guevara.
Cuban health care, Garcia writes, is so grand, even Americans are students at a Cuban medical school.
And, she proclaims, it has nothing to do with politics!
American med students in Cuba? When Fidel Castro heard from an American congressman that areas of his large district did not have even one doctor, he offered up full scholarships for American students to attend med school in Cuba. This program offered American students who don’t have the family or financial assistance the opportunity to go to med school. Politically motivated you wonder? The system that allows this program has made huge efforts to maintain it as a non-political program. For the majority of students, the focus is to get the training in the med school program so they can return to the United States and become a doctor for underserved communities.
As on the program, no mention of political prisoners or general oppression. It’s all America’s fault.
Read the whole frustrating thing here.
I just wrote the following but I’ll bet a dollar it never gets posted.
Did you encounter any Cuban doctors whom you could ask about how castro trades doctors to countries like Venezuela in exchange for oil?
Did you happen to check out any of the actual health care facilities or hospitals where the average Cuban has to go for care (not where the foreigners are treated) and if so, what did you think of those unsanitary, beyond-third world conditions?
Finally, in that picture of the happy, ice-cream eating couple underneath a banner of one of the biggest assassins in Latin American history, did you happen to research what he actually did before posing for that picture?
No, la vida no es fácil en Cuba, and you don’t have even an iota of a clue.
CNN is trying to catch up to the Today Show with their pro-Castro propaganda, now that they no longer have Lucia Newman. Today, CNN featured Sgt. Carlos Lazo playing a guitar and singing Guantanamera to a congresswoman he is trying to sway to pass legislation to lift travel restrictions to Cuba. You might remember Sgt. Lazo as the balsero who arrived on U.S. shores in the early 1990s, joined the Army, and was sent to fight in Iraq. Then he whined about not being able to frequently travel to Cuba to see his sons who remained there. His focus was always on U.S. policy, not Cuban restrictions on free travel. HiThe Lazo boys were finally allowed to travel to America. It appears that the sergeant enjoyed his celebrity status so much, that now he has become an anti-embargo activist while in U.S. Army uniform. Just what Castro needed now that Cindy Sheehan has retired.
Free Healthcare? Somebody somewhere, somehow has to pay. There is no free ticket anywhere. Somehow, someway, you pay with green or with your hide!
All this is proof that the Cuban regime has a very powerful propaganda machine that never stops churning out propaganda and that the mainstream media in the USA is a combination of weak, amoral, ignorant, indifferent and complicitous.
The MSM, also, has a total disregard for Cuban exiles, because surely they must be aware of the anger and dismay that the Today program out of Cuba has engendered in us, but they continue to add insult to injury.
We are neophytes in this war of words, since all that we really have are blogs [which are great] but compared to them we are a puddle of water next to an ocean.
I’m not trying to be pessimistic because I know that the Internet is the wave of the future and if we get enough blogs working in unison, we can make a difference, but until then we will be at a serious disadvantage.
Far too many people, including many supposed intellectuals and sohisticates, see and approach Cuba as a kind of theme park or zoo. It doesn’t matter what the “animals” really think or feel or want, since their function is to gratify and amuse the patrons (and there’s an awful lot of patronizing and condescension, not to say racism, going on).
That’s why so many “progressives” defend Castro’s system even though they’d NEVER want the same system for themselves. But such a system is seen as perfectly OK for lesser creatures: after all, they’re just animals, so what’s the big deal? And they’re SO exotic, quaint, and picturesque, too!
That’s why, when liberals controlled Spain in colonial times, they wanted liberal reforms for SPAIN, but they wouldn’t consider extending that to Cuba. Cubans, after all, were DIFFERENT, you see. Like pets, or servants, or slaves. No need to worry much about THEIR wishes or rights. That’s not what their role is. Get it?
Anyone else notice that out of all the comments being sent to the blog by concerned readers – not a single one has been published? Unreal!