CNN Uses Pro-Communist American to Tout Cuban Health Care
NewsBusters.org ^ | August 8, 2009 | Rich Noyes
Gail Reed
There’s something deeply wrong with journalism that scrutinizes and criticizes the institutions of free and successful nations, but produces puff pieces on the supposed achievements of totalitarian dictatorships. On Thursday, CNN aired a piece of Communist Party propaganda about how Cuba could serve as “a model for health care reform” in the United States, complete with an authoritative sound bite from an American medical expert, identified only as someone “who’s lived and worked in Cuba for decades.”
But the expert, Gail Reed, is a longtime admirer of the Cuban revolution, married to the Cuban official who served as ambassador to Grenada in the early 1980s when U.S. troops liberated the island from hardline communists who had executed the leftist Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. She's also worked at Granma, Cuba’s official communist party newspaper.
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As for Reed, she was profiled in the Miami Herald back in 1983 after she and her husband returned to Cuba after American forces liberated Grenada. She talked about the fear she felt at seeing U.S. Marines surrounding the Cuban embassy, and told the newspaper, “I feel I have a very strong identification with the Cuban revolution.”
“When I first came to Cuba in the ’70s, I was very impressed with their efforts in building a new kind of society,” Reed explained.