How the media lies for Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, part I

The sadistic Che Guevara has no shortage of media admirers. Roslyn Guy interviewed the Aleida Guevara who acts as a propaganda mouthpiece for the murderous Fidel Castro. Guy tells us that dear old Aledia is here to defend members of the La Red Avispa, known as the Wasp Network, who, according to the ever so accommodating little Miss Guy, Guevara believes were convicted on “trumped-up charges” (The Age, In her father's footsteps, 25 May 2005).

Did our keen-eyed journalist contradict Guevara? Of course not. So let me fill in some of the details that Miss Guy didn’t want to bother her readers with. Wasp Network was fairly extensive and to which Ana Montes, one of Castro’s most important agents, was closely linked.

Montes successfully infiltrated the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) in 1986. Her cover was blown in 2000. She was arrested by the FBI in September of that year at her intelligence office in the Bolling Air Force Base. (It is rumoured that she was exposed by a member of the network who had been arrested in Florida). This Stalinist is now doing 25 years for espionage.

Of the 16 members of the spy ring, four fled the country five confessed following their arrest and another 5 were convicted in June 2001 while in September 2 more pleaded guilty. Like Montes these spies communicated with their DGI masters via short wave radios.

Moreover, these victims of Yankee imperialism helped organise the murder of four Cuban exiles in an operation that Cuban intelligence codenamed.

“We have dealt the Miami Right a hard blow, in which your role has been decisive.” They called their murderous undertaking “Operation Scorpion”. The DGI were so pleased with their efforts that they sent them a celebratory message congratulating them for their efforts in having “dealt the Miami Right a hard blow, in which your role has been decisive”.

Strange as it might seem, the indefatigable Roslyn Guy made no mention of any of these facts. I guess the word of a vindictive liar is good enough for her — so long as the liar is one of Castro’s willing pawns

Toeing the Castro line Roslyn Guy claimed, without a hint of embarrassment, that the United States blockade against Cuba’s Stalinist regime “has made life a constant struggle for ordinary Cubans”. Ordinarily I would call any one who made this claim a lying apologist for tyranny. However, I recognise congenital idiocy when I see it.

Now let us do what the idiotic Roslyn Guy is unable to do and that is recognise a simple fact: Castro’s socialism impoverished Cuba, not the US. That central planning has been a total disaster whenever it has been applied is something that Roslyn Guy should know but evidently doesn’t. (Se von Mises’ Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, first published in 1920).

Something else she apparently doesn’t know is that Castro has been successfully circumventing the embargo for years by buying from the rest of the world, including France, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Scandinavia, etc. In fact Canada is the tyrant’s third-largest trading partner. In 1998 Jean Chretien, then Prime Minister of Canada, bragged about the two countries “thriving commercial relationship”.

Informed Canadians know that Chretien was lying about the success of trade deals with Castro. Adecon Ship Management, a Canadian company, is owed US$2.2 million by Castro. Despite a Canadian federal court order to cough up bandit refuses to pay. When one of the company’s directors flew to Havana to negotiate a settlement good old Castro had him thrown in the clink. It took intervention by the Canadian government to get the man released.

Castro has cost the Canadian taxpayer millions. The man’s economic stupidity is such that about three years ago Canada's Export Development Agency stated that it would “not be responsible for us to promote business [in Cuba] considering the current circumstances”. Moreover, Castro owes Europeans and Mexico billions of dollars. So far this political mobster has not shown any indication of paying.

What Roslyn Guy also overlooked is that during the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union subsidised Castro to the tune of about US$6 billion a year. This subsidy probably exceeded the famous Marshall Plan.

To therefore suggest, as she does, that US managed to isolate Castro’s murderous regime economically is palpable rubbish.

Of course, the lefty Roslyn Guy actually had more than two brain cells she would have wondered how it was that before Castro’s dictatorship Cuba produced a food surplus while now it is reduced to begging for foreign aid. In other words, Roslyn Guy, why did Cuba’s agricultural productivity collapse once this swaggering thug took control?

(Under the guidance of this economic genius Cuba went from earning large sums from food exports to spending an average of a billion dollars a year on food imports. Now what does this situation remind me of?)

And while Roslyn Guy is struggling with the conundrum of Cuba’s ravaged agriculture perhaps she would also like to explain why Cuban living standards — which before Castro exceeded those of Italy, Spain and Austria — also collapsed.

According to the brilliant Roslyn “…Cubans, once ill-educated and poor, are now almost universally literate and have more doctors per capita than almost anywhere on earth”. This is outrageous, even for a leftwing hack from The Age.

Back in 1957 Cuba had the thirteenth lowest infant mortality rate in the world and the lowest in Latin America. So how can things have improved if, as Castro says, the infant mortality rate is twenty-fourth in the world. And if you believe this figure then you should apply for a job with The Age.

Castro’s media friends boast about the number of Cuban doctors (this lot will swallow anything Castro throws at them) but ignore the fact that in 1957 the ratio of doctors and teachers to the population was twice as large as the US ratio, and the literacy rate was 80 per cent. And what’s more, the people were free to read anything they wanted.

What the lefty likes of Roslyn Guy will never tell their readers is that Cuba’s medical services are not just a shambles they are a sham. Dr. Hilda Molina was one of Cuba’s top neurosurgeons who made the mistake of criticising her country’s health system. What particularly offended her was the sight of rich foreigners paying for first-class treatment while ordinary Cubans suffered some of the worst medical care on the planet. (Naturally the political elite, people like Aleida Guevara, also received the best care).

Castro vengefully stripped her of everything, including the right to work. In desperation she tried to obtain a visa from the Argentinean embassy early this year. They threw her out. She was picked up by Castro’s agents and then simply disappeared. Another Cuban tragedy that The Age refused to report.

In May 2000 Noris Pena Martinez and Drs. Leonel Cordova Rodriquez defected while on a Cuban medical mission to Zimbabwe. They managed to reach Sweden and from they went to Miami. Dr Rodriquez stated:

…foreign tourists and Cuban revolutionary leaders enjoy the best medical attention and resources in well-equipped hospitals without feeling the lack of resources that the Cuban population [endures]. . . It doesn't matter if the medicines came from United States ... [The communist elite] have the best and the most advanced laboratory equipment. . . But it’s very different when the Cuban people have to go to the hospital. If you are a member of the Communist Party, you are to receive the best attention. But you have to be a very high member of the Communist Party.

The truth be told, and the The Age will never tell it, the Cuban health system is a third-world cesspit.

Now let us turn to Castro, the worker’s friend. Instead of letting Cubans freely work for foreign companies he literally rents them out, as if they were his private property — which in fact they are. Foreign companies have to pay this blustering gangster in cash for Cuban workers, in turn the Cuban worker’s pal and protector pockets 95 per cent for himself and his toadies, among whom we will find Aleida Guevara. I guess this is what so-called reporters like Roslyn Guy mean by social justice.

See The media covers for the murderous Fidel Castro and does his dirty work for details on how The Age tries to whitewash Castro.

I would add that CNN's reporter in Cuba is the ultra-lefty Lucia Newman, whose career has included providing the Sandinistas with favorable coverage when she was in Nicaragua. Her husband ran (runs?) CISPES. As far as I'm concerned, everything that CNN has to say about Cuba is suspect.

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