Anyone that follows Cuba even slightly has seen one of countless articles that have been written about the farcical elections that are coming up in Cuba. All of the articles come to the same conclusion, that these “elections will determine whether fidel castro continues as ‘president'”.
And this is why foreign news agencies maintain Cuba bureaus? To give us the same regurgitated crap from Prensa Latina and Granma?
The ruling, signed by interim leader Raul Castro and read on state television, set the date for elections to provincial and national assemblies — voting that is held every five years.
There was no explicit mention of Fidel Castro, but the 81-year-old leader of the Cuban Revolution must be re-elected to the national parliament before he could repeat as president of the Council of State to remain in full power.
Imagine that. “Elections” in January and Cubans still don’t know who the “candidates” are. But then again why would they need to know since there’s only one party and the candidates run unopposed? Saves a lot of money on campaign ads. Memo to self: keep this in mind when Joe Garcia and other “netroots” Dems talk about “publicly financed elections”.
My prediction on what’s going to happen with these so-called elections. fidel will not appear on the ballot except maybe for some new position they create for him, we’ll call it dictator emeritus. raul castro will be on the ballot and will become the “president”. And all of the news media will tout the transition of power though it’s no transition at all. Then the drumbeat will begin in earnest. With fidel “officially out of power” they will say that the time is now to lower the embargo and embrace Cuba. Fasten your seatbelts folks, the communist propaganda machine is just getting warmed up.
Instead of just watching it happen I suggest that those of you that agree with me that the U.S. should maintain as hard a line as possible on Cuba until democracy is restored begin to denounce these sham elections and the monarchical succession they are meant to camouflage. The only change required is change ON THE ISLAND. Real change. Not castro communism with a new face. Then and only then should the U.S. consider dropping the embargo.
That is an excellent question. Why do news bureaus have offices in Cuba? Because I constantly search for news about Cuba, as do Henry and Val, and one thing that I see in EVERY CASE is,all stories about Cuba are derived from the same source – the Cuban disinformation machine. Half of the “News Stories” do not even bother to change one word of the official Cuban line. Some of the bigger MSM do at least reword their stories to make it appear that they are different. They could save lots of money by closing their Havana bureaus and just cut and pasting the Cuban government verbatim.