Washington Post-Why Bernie Sanders's repeating Cuban propaganda rankles so many Latinos

[ancianita]

13. Then I'M a Cuba apologist. The terrorist was the USA, trying to kill Castro several hundred times.

I hate when I read this stuff in America, but I won't back down from addressing it. It's been WE, the USA, that have been the terrorists. This is our proven, unclassified history.

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

I lived just north of Miami for fifteen years, from age 3 to age 18, and made friends with at least three Cuban refugees who worked in the area. From 8th grade on I acquired conversational level Spanish in and out of school, and learned a lot about the Cubans who left and the Cubans who stayed.

You need to read more Cuban history of its constant conquering and enslavements, about Jose Marti, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and others who fought for Cuban independence from colonial enslavement and exploitation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuba#Independence_movements


Batista was a popular Cuban military veteran figure turned mafia capitalist. Hell, even I knew that because my parents told me so. Everybody in South Florida knew that Batista was tied up with Mayer Lansky's gambling mafia and who-knows-what-else. Castro and Guevara drove him out because Cubans suffered poverty and starvation under Batista. We, bad neighbor of El Norte, helped Batista become dictator.

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

Cubans who have left know the propaganda only too well, and understand why a government desperate to establish its legitimacy in the face of the mass impoverishment of its population would turn to it again and again.

Cubans who left were Batista loyalists. Right wing. Capitalists. They did well in Miami because the gaming capitalists of South Florida welcomed them.

They're still there! They love Trump for the same reasons they loved Batista!

But not all of them. Some of them are working class Cubans. They know the old Cubans up in Ybor City, in Tampa, the first city founded by Cubans in Florida.

In reality, Cuba’s reputation for educational prowess is mostly a product of a relentless, multi-decade propaganda campaign.

Bullshit. I've talked to Cubans during two two-week visits in the last three years, and I can attest that they are well educated, whether they push a cart, farm, drive taxis or work in restaurants and hotels. Being a teacher, I made it a point to ask them how education in Cuba was for them. The literacy HAS been a miracle, and is the highest in the Caribbean if not the Americas. We can thank the lawyer, Fidel Castro, for setting up free education from 1st grade through college, whether you want to or not.

There's a reason their medical school has turned out thousands upon thousands of doctors who have aided Cuba's African allies struggling to throw European asset strippers off their lands. We can thank the doctor, Che Guevara, for setting up Cuba's medical school in Havana, and Cuba's hospital system.

I visited, with a group of six other Spanish speakers and a university professor guide, the northern farmlands and villages of Pinar del Río, Artemisa, La Habana, Mayabeque, Matanzas and Cienfuegos provinces. Many visits, talks with Cubans, photos of farmlands and people, and great learning about their so-called "poverty." In the south, on my second trip, a full week in Santiago de Cuba, formerly Oriente province, my guide for two days was a native Santiago resident, a lovely, proud young woman who rode me around by taxis and pedicabs, taught me so much history from Fidel's grave and the world class cemetery of the greats of Cuba in Santiago, through the city, all the way to the castle/forts on the coastline. (El Morro is a similar one in Puerto Rico)

We know propaganda doesn’t need to be entirely false to be profoundly damaging. So we despair when we hear it parroted by those who ought to know better.

Oh, I do know better. I know that every single thing I've learned from Cubans and Cuba shows that what you say here is the real propaganda, the same I've read since I was a kid learning about Cuba from Cuban refugees.

The bottom line is that when you associate yourself with an ideology whose past contains some of history’s worst crimes, you take on a special duty to denounce. When those denunciations come hedged with qualifiers that rest on propaganda lines, they ring entirely hollow.

No country who struggles for sovereignty or freedom is clean. Not a single one.

MY Bottom Line: I challenge anyone in DU to travel to Cuba and not come back changed. If they don't come back with an entirely changed view of Cuba, I will pay their air fare AND buy them a cerveza. Hold me to it.

The only "parrots who don't know better" are those who haven't, don't or won't go to Cuba to see for themselves, and prefer to parrot this mal vecino's propaganda dished out for the last 60 years.

We should be ashamed of what bad neighbors we have been to all of the Americas, especially Cuba, which we've coveted like an empire vulture since the last century. Oh, and Alice Walker, a great American writer, was among the first to challenge the travel sanctions imposed on US by our own government; you know, a wall.

Viva Cuba Libre!