This morning I did my usual Google News Search for news regarding Cuba and was surprised to find on top of the list an AP article on the letter written and signed by 494 Cuban dissidents we reported on yesterday. This pleasant surprise, however, was soon dampened by the realization that after searching in vain for reports on the letter from other news organizations, it appears that only AP decided to run the story.
To add insult to injury, they did not even get the number of signers (492 instead of 494) right.
Dissidents decry US bill to end Cuba travel ban
HAVANA — Five days after his release for health reasons, a former Cuban political prisoner added his name to a letter signed by nearly 500 opposition activists decrying proposed legislation that would lift the U.S. travel ban to their country.
The letter, e-mailed to foreign reporters in Havana on Thursday, took the opposite approach of a statement last week supporting the same bill and signed by 74 dissidents, many with international notoriety — including Cuba’s top blogger Yoani Sanchez, and Elizardo Sanchez, who is not related to Yoani but heads the island’s top human rights group.
The bill in question was introduced Feb. 23 by Rep. Collin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat, and would bar the president from prohibiting travel to Cuba or blocking transactions required to make such trips.
It also would halt the White House from stopping direct transfers between U.S. and Cuban banks. That would make it easier for the island’s government to pay for U.S. food and farm exports, which have been allowed for a decade, despite Washington’s 48-year-old trade embargo.
Thursday’s letter said, “to be benevolent with the dictatorship would mean solidarity with the oppressors of the Cuban nation.” It featured 492 signers from all over Cuba, but most were little-known, even among the island’s small and divided dissident and political opposition community.
One exception was Ariel Sigler, a 44-year-old who is paralyzed from the waist down and who was freed to much fanfare Saturday. He was released to his home in Matanzas province after serving more than seven years of a 25-year sentence for treason.
Sigler was among 75 leading opposition activists, community organizers, dissidents and independent journalists rounded up in March 2003 — when the world’s attention was focused on the start of the Iraq war — and charged with taking money from Washington to destabilize Cuba’s government. Those imprisoned denied that, as did U.S. officials.
Sigler went to prison a boxer in excellent shape, but became confined to a wheelchair while behind bars.
I guess some would say we should be happy that at least the AP picked up the story. But that, in my opinion, would be akin to accepting the status of second or third-class citizenship that the world has imposed on the courageous Cubans on the island that have stood against the tyranny of the much-loved dictatorship, the Castro regime. It seems that Cuban dissidents who are unapologetic and straight forward in their opposition to the regime that oppresses and murders them is not all that sexy and attractive to news agencies.
Just look where the Herald buried it today.
Not only is it buried, Mambi, all they did was post the same AP article. They went to as much trouble as the Roswell Daily Record in New Mexico did.
This is the real problem. People in Cuba have different perspectives, but their agenda/end game is the same.
People covering Cuba, on the other hand… very different story. The disproportionate efforts to cover a letter signed by 74 v one signed by 494 are the most telling thing about all this.
I would urge people to e-mail this AP article to their local papers’ editors. Running the AP story is better than nothing.
If the Miami Herald outfit (all of it, not just the English version) were any more dubious, it’d be Granma designed for US consumption. How any self-respecting Cuban or Cuban-American could support such an operation is beyond me. It’s like paying somebody to spit on you and mock you. To say that I don’t trust the Herald is an understatement.