Some Standard Cynical CIA-Style Cuba Covid Reporting at The Washington Post

[Judi Lynn]

APRIL 2, 2021
BY PAUL STREET

Never underestimate the cynicism of American corporate media. As the Scotland-based historian Helen Yaffe recently observed on Counterpunch, the socialist state of Cuba currently has five COVID-19 vaccines in clinical trials “and is set to be among the first nations to vaccinate its entire population.” Further: “Cuba has gone on the offensive against Covid-19, mobilizing the prevention-focused, community based public healthcare system to carry out daily house visits to actively detect and treat cases and channeling the medical science sector to adapt and produce new treatments for patients and Covid-19 specific vaccines. These advances bring hope not just for Cuba, but for the world.”

Cuba has one of the lowest COVID-19 infection rates and one of the lowest COVID-19 death rates in the Western world. The relatively small island nation is the only Latin American country to have developed its own vaccine. We can expect Cuba to export its vaccine, as it has long exported its surplus medical workers, to other nations within and beyond Latin America. By the end of the year, the island nation of 11 million should be able to produce 100 million doses.

The Cuban accomplishment, achieved despite the United States’ draconian blockade, is remarkable. As Jaffe notes, it’s all about the socialism, the creation of a society outside and against the rule of imperialist capitalism. “Cuba,” Yaffe writes: “has become a world-leader in biotechnology because it has a socialist state with a centrally planned economy, that has invested in science and technology and puts human welfare before …capitalism and greed…. it is the absence of the capitalist profit motive which underlies the outstanding domestic and international response to Covid-19 by socialist Cuba…”

Indeed. Socialist Cuba, founded in part by a Marxist physician (Che Guevera) who said that love for one’s fellow human beings was at the heart of being a revolutionary, puts humanity first, without concern for private accumulation and return. Imagine.

But journalists Anthony Faiola and Ana Vanessa Herrero, reporters at the longtime CIA-affiliated Washington Post, know better. All they can see in socialist Cuba’s humanistic COVID-19 achievements are an attempted “public relations coup for an isolated country that was added back to the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism in the final days of the Trump administration.”

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/02/some-standard-cynical-cia-style-cuba-covid-reporting-at-the-washington-post/

[pnwmom]

1. I'm not going to take seriously an author who's written a book blaming Obama and the Ds

for the rise of Trump.

I'm not going to help his book by linking to Amazon, but this is the blurb there.

The horror is all around us. It proliferates our daily news. It dominates social media. The economy is in shambles. The COVID pandemic is spreading like wildfire while we face the strangest US election in modern history. If you want to make sense of it all, (name of book) is required reading. In CounterPunch's latest book, radical historian Paul Street recounts the Democrats' culpability in the rise of Trump and explains how his neofascist horrors took root during the Obama years, and will live on even if Joe Biden is victorious in November.

[AnrothElf]

2. Counterpunch is a trusted news source here?

Maybe I'm on the wrong site. Reddit r/democrats would remove this, or it would sink to oblivion.

If I wanted someone trying to gaslight me about Che Guevara, who ordered whole families shot in the back of the head, I would browse ... I dunno. What do tankies read these days? I mean, besides Rose Twitter?

[Judi Lynn]

3. Please don't hesitate to post the link to your source for Che Guevara... whole families shot....

Have never caught that one, have been reading on Latin American/US history for decades.

Please share your reference.

By the way, do you have any comments on the content of the article, like the work the Washington Post has been doing all these years in its stories on leftist Latin American leaders, and its well-known (by people who bother to research) association with the C.I.A. over the years?

You'd be doing yourself a favor by taking the time to really looking into the subject.

You could enlighten yourself by reading on the Senate Hearings by Democratic Senator Frank Church, who most certainly covered this area long ago.

[Voltaire2]

4. Your efforts here are appreciated.

People are submerged in a sea of disinformation.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Thank you, Voltaire2! Victims of "perception management", sadly. Not by accident, either.

It takes some of us a very long time to recognize it, doesn't it? So much more tragic, the majority never takes time to really think or ask questions, and simply die as confused and ignorant as they were at any point in their lives, like so many who actually stop learning the moment they are out of school, and NEVER actually wake up, and grow up emotionally, intellectually.

Thank you for taking the time to think!

[EX500rider]

6. He was a psychopath

The Cuban Missile Crisis:
A few weeks after the crisis, during an interview with the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker, Guevara was still fuming over the perceived Soviet betrayal and told correspondent Sam Russell that, if the missiles had been under Cuban control, they would have fired them off. While expounding on the incident later, Guevara reiterated that the cause of socialist liberation against global "imperialist aggression" would ultimately have been worth the possibility of "millions of atomic war victims".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

[Judi Lynn]

9. Thanks for sharing that source, very interesting!

I don't know if you really want to rely upon something someone said Che Guevara said to him as proof he was a psychopath!

I did see some interesting examples of Che Guevara's history of actions on the battlefield against the blood-thirsty, U.S.-supported filthy, sadistic dictator, Fulgencio Batista, however.









Batista sitting with Ambassador Earl ET Smith.

References to his behavior during wartime and after:

Guevara's teenage lieutenant, Joel Iglesias, recounts such actions in his diary, noting that Guevara's behavior in combat even brought admiration from the enemy. On one occasion Iglesias recounts the time he had been wounded in battle, stating "Che ran out to me, defying the bullets, threw me over his shoulder, and got me out of there. The guards didn't dare fire at him ... later they told me he made a great impression on them when they saw him run out with his pistol stuck in his belt, ignoring the danger, they didn't dare shoot."[96]

To quell the rebellion, Cuban government troops began executing rebel prisoners on the spot, and regularly rounded up, tortured, and shot civilians as a tactic of intimidation.[98] By March 1958, the continued atrocities carried out by Batista's forces led the United States to stop selling arms to the Cuban government.[86] Then in late July 1958, Guevara played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine Corps analyzed and described Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".[99] During this time Guevara also became an "expert" at leading hit-and-run tactics against Batista's army, and then fading back into the countryside before the army could counterattack.[100]

To quell the rebellion, Cuban government troops began executing rebel prisoners on the spot, and regularly rounded up, tortured, and shot civilians as a tactic of intimidation.[98] By March 1958, the continued atrocities carried out by Batista's forces led the United States to stop selling arms to the Cuban government.[86] Then in late July 1958, Guevara played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes by using his column to halt a force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo in a plan to encircle and destroy Castro's forces. Years later, Major Larry Bockman of the United States Marine Corps analyzed and described Che's tactical appreciation of this battle as "brilliant".[99] During this time Guevara also became an "expert" at leading hit-and-run tactics against Batista's army, and then fading back into the countryside before the army could counterattack.[100]

To implement a portion of this plan, Castro named Guevara commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison, for a five-month tenure (2 January through 12 June 1959).[118] Guevara was charged by the new government with purging the Batista army and consolidating victory by exacting "revolutionary justice" against those regarded as traitors, chivatos (informants) or war criminals.[119] As commander of La Cabaña, Guevara reviewed the appeals of those convicted during the revolutionary tribunal process.[9] The tribunals were conducted by 2–3 army officers, an assessor, and a respected local citizen.[120] On some occasions the penalty delivered by the tribunal was death by firing-squad.[121] Raúl Gómez Treto, senior legal advisor to the Cuban Ministry of Justice, has argued that the death penalty was justified in order to prevent citizens themselves from taking justice into their own hands, as had happened twenty years earlier in the anti-Machado rebellion.[122] Biographers note that in January 1959 the Cuban public was in a "lynching mood",[123] and point to a survey at the time showing 93% public approval for the tribunal process.[9] Moreover, a 22 January 1959, Universal Newsreel broadcast in the United States and narrated by Ed Herlihy featured Fidel Castro asking an estimated one million Cubans whether they approved of the executions, and being met with a roaring "¡Si!" (yes).[124] With as many as 20,000 Cubans estimated to have been killed at the hands of Batista's collaborators,[125][126][127][128] and many of the accused war criminals sentenced to death accused of torture and physical atrocities,[9] the newly-empowered government carried out executions, punctuated by cries from the crowds of "¡al paredón!" ([to the] wall!),[115] which biographer Jorge Castañeda describes as "without respect for due process".[129]

I have yet to find a single credible source pointing to a case where Che executed "an innocent". Those persons executed by Guevara or on his orders were condemned for the usual crimes punishable by death at times of war or in its aftermath: desertion, treason or crimes such as rape, torture or murder. I should add that my research spanned five years, and included anti-Castro Cubans among the Cuban-American exile community in Miami and elsewhere.
—Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, PBS forum[130]

Thanks for posting the link to this Wikipedia information.



Liked puppies, also! 🐶

[EX500rider]

10. "I don't know if you really want to rely upon..."

You mean something he said in a interview with a newspaper, the British communist newspaper the Daily Worker?
Hardly a unsympathetic journal for him and easy source to have proved wrong if such was the case.

And yes, as the commander of the La Cabaña Fortress prison a normal person would have let the firing squad do the death sentences, only a psychopath would pull out their own pistol and shoot the condemned person in the head at close range.

Perhaps as a exercise you should imagine someone you don't like doing that, say some right wing governor or politician, you'd be screaming they were a blood thirsty psycho if they killed condemned a prisoner personally with their own pistol at close range.

[Judi Lynn]

11. It would be appropriate if you would post the link to your incident story from La Cabana Fortress.

Are you contending he shot someone in the head like the US-supported South Vietnamese officer who shot his prisoner at point blank range?



Eddie Adams' iconic Vietnam War photo: What happened next
Published29 January 2018



. . .



. . .



. . .

Heavy street fighting had pitched Saigon into chaos when South Vietnamese military caught a suspected Viet Cong squad leader, Nguyen Van Lem, at the site of a mass grave of more than 30 civilians.

Adams began taking photos as Lem was frogmarched through the streets to Loan's jeep.

Loan stood beside Lem before pointing his pistol at the prisoner's head.

"I thought he was going to threaten or terrorise the guy," Adams recalled afterwards, "so I just naturally raised my camera and took the picture."

Lem was believed to have murdered the wife and six children of one of Loan's colleagues. The general fired his pistol.

"If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you," the general said about the suddenness of his actions.

. . .

Adams and Loan stayed in touch, even becoming friends after the general fled South Vietnam at the end of the war for the United States.

But upon Loan's arrival, US Immigration and Nationalization Services wanted to deport him, a move influenced by the photo. They approached Adams to testify against Loan, but Adams instead testified in his favour.

Adams even appeared on television to explain the circumstances of the photograph.

Congress eventually lifted the deportation and Loan was allowed to stay, opening a restaurant in a Washington, DC suburb serving hamburgers, pizza and Vietnamese dishes.

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42864421

[EX500rider]

12. Woops, I misremembered the facts in that case...

...it didn't happen while he was prison commander, however he still took it upon himself to shoot the guy as apposed to letting a firing squad handle it as is normal in such cases.

Guevara was a harsh disciplinarian who sometimes shot defectors. Deserters were punished as traitors, and Guevara was known to send squads to track those seeking to go AWOL.[87] As a result, Guevara became feared for his brutality and ruthlessness.[88] During the guerrilla campaign, Guevara was also responsible for the summary executions of a number of men accused of being informers, deserters or spies.

In his diaries, Guevara described the first such execution of Eutimio Guerra, a peasant army guide who admitted treason...Che stepped forward and shot him in the head, writing "The situation was uncomfortable for the people and for Eutimio so I ended the problem giving him a shot with a .32 pistol in the right side of the brain, with exit orifice in the right temporal [lobe].

"summary executions" generally means no trial.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara

[Judi Lynn]

13. I saw that in the Wikipedia. Does it compare with My Lai, with gunning down civilians in Iraq,

of full support for the 30,000+ tortures, murders, disappearances of Argentinian suspected leftists by the right-wing military junta, US President Nixon's, Kissinger and CIA Richard Helm's assisted sadistic dictator Augusto Pinochet's incredible tortures and murders, even cremations of political dissidents in Chile, Fujimori's death squad massacres in Peru, Colombia's fully supported and financed war against leftist dissidents in Colombia continually since the 1940's, the US President Reagan's total, enthusiastic support for the war of genocide against Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and the US government's effort to manipulate, orchestrate, financially support, covertly participate with "advisors" and even soldiers at times in Central America since 1954, George H W Bush's military invasion of Panama, and the murder of civilians who were buried in mass graves, all conducted and presented as a strategy to capture the President who was also working for the CIA? So many hundreds of thousands of innocents it's beyond forgiveness, as well as using Guatemalan citizens as Guinea pigs, causing desperate drawn-out suffering? ETC, ETC., ETC., ETC? Why do you imagine Bill Clinton apologized for the sadistic medical experiments? They were even conducted upon US citizens, as most of us know.

Fortunately, a lot of US Americans are starting to awaken from their propaganda-induced stupor in the current era, and start looking by doing their own homework, taking the time to discover what was deliberately concealed through the generations.

It's going to be a lot harder for right-wingers to keep the lies alive.

Thanks, again, for the Wikipedia link. It has a lot of good information.

[EX500rider]

14. Other people have done bad stuff...

... isn't a particularly compelling argument.
Summary executions are summary executions... ie no trial but I think you're guilty so I'm going to shoot you.

[Judi Lynn]

15. Oh, now I see.I should get all huffy that he shot a sadistic greedy mob-connected dictator's thug. 👍

[EX500rider]

17. He executed I.e murdered multiple people

Who may or may not have been guilty of anything

[Judi Lynn]

16. Oh, now I see.I should get all huffy that he shot a sadistic greedy mob-connected dictator's thug. 👍

[sinkingfeeling]

5. I read that WP piece and was disgusted by some of those comments.

[Judi Lynn]

8. They've been on the war path against leftist leaders, particularly in the Americas a looong time.

It never varies, either.

Of course, we can easily throw the Wall Street Journal in there, and almost everything from the New York Times, unfortunately. The Times had to can three rabid anti-Chavista writers Juan Forero, Simon Romero, and Francisco Toro. Francisco Toro admits his hatred of Hugo Chavez, always identified with the Venezuelan oligarchs, and started his own anti-Chavez, now anti-Maduro hate sheet, "Caracas Chronicles."

A lot of journalists fall into the class war trap by living in the wealthy environments in the countries where they work, among other professionals, identify with them, and NEVER have a glimmering of what life is like for the vast majority of suffering, shunned, indigenous, or African-descended, or working class citizens. Grotesque.

Thank you, so much, sinkingfeeling. There's a lot to sift through with the Washington Post, as it's point of view hasn't changed in decades regarding movements to improve the wellbeing of the masses. Glad you have taken the time to avoid swallowing it.

[Judi Lynn]

18. Wikipedia review of US-supported vicious dictator Fulgencio Batista and why the revolution happened:

Last edited Tue Apr 6, 2021, 09:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Snippets, from the complete article:

According to historian and author James S. Olson, the U.S. government essentially became a "co-conspirator" in the arrangement because of Batista's strong opposition to communism, which, in the rhetoric of the Cold War, seemed to maintain business stability and a pro-U.S. posture on the island.[9] Thus, in the view of Olson, "The U.S. government had no difficulty in dealing with him, even if he was a hopeless despot."[9] On October 6, 1960 Senator John F. Kennedy, in the midst of his campaign for the U.S. Presidency, decried Batista's relationship with the U.S. government and criticized the Eisenhower administration for supporting him:

Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years ... and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state—destroying every individual liberty. Yet our aid to his regime, and the ineptness of our policies, enabled Batista to invoke the name of the United States in support of his reign of terror. Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista—hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend—at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people, and we failed to press for free elections.[49]

Batista, Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution

I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country's policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear.

—?U.S. President John F. Kennedy, to Jean Daniel, October 24, 1963[62]

In an effort to gather information about Castro's army, Batista's secret police pulled in people for questioning. Many innocent people were tortured by Batista's police, while suspects, including youth, were publicly executed as a warning to others who were considering joining the insurgency. Additionally, "Hundreds of mangled bodies were left hanging from lamp posts or dumped in the streets in a grotesque variation of the Spanish colonial practice of public executions."[71] The brutal behavior backfired and increased support for the guerrillas. In 1958, 45 organizations signed an open letter supporting July 26 Movement, among them national bodies representing lawyers, architects, dentists, accountants, and social workers. Castro, who had originally relied on the support of the poor, was now gaining the backing of the influential middle classes.[citation needed]

The United States supplied Batista with planes, ships, tanks and the latest technology, such as napalm, which he used against the insurgency. However, in March 1958, the U.S. announced it would stop selling arms to the Cuban government.[78] Soon after, the U.S. imposed an arms embargo, further weakening the government's position,[79][page needed] although land owners and others who benefited from the government continued to support Batista.[35]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista

P.S. As a side-note, a Cuban newspaper publisher, rancher, US-educated maniac and good friend of Fulgencio Batista, Rolando Masferrer sponsored his own private army (death squad) called "Masferrer's Tigers" which roamed the streets, sneaking down political dissidents to be tortured and murdered and used for purposes of terrorism. Death squads were also known to take their prisoners to open spaces where they were forced to dig their own graves before being killed, even forcing some of them to get inside the coarse bags which held seeds, or other agricultural products (called "gunny sacks" in the US) , doused in gasoline, and set on fire. Each unique terror stunt was created to strike panic among the survivors whom they expected to pass the word until the whole country became afraid to move, paralyzed with fear.

Around the city of Santiago de Cuba, death squads picked up those dissidents, quartered them, and hung their body parts from trees where the citizens would be sure to see them. Mothers of these young men appeared in a march down the streets of Santiago de Cuba, carrying signs for the US ambassador, who was visiting the town, to see, as they ran to beg him to intercede with Fulgencio Batista. The police responded by hosing them all down with fire hoses.









US Ambassador Earl Smith arrived



Police with fire hoses arrived

The Cuban Revolution
Santiago de Cuba Protest
(1957)

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/santiago-protest.htm

(This happened BEFORE the revolution.)

U.S. reporters covering
the Cuban Revolution

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/reporters.htm