During the Mercosur summit in Argentina, WJAN-TV South Florida
reporter, Manuel Cao, asked Cuban President Fidel Castro why his government
didn't allow a prominent doctor and dissident to leave the country.
Quick as lightning, Castro shot back, "Who pays you?"
Now we find that Cao's paymaster was the US government: he received
$10,400 in payments so far this year. Cao is one among 10 South Florida
journalists to have been found accepting money in exchange for touting
propaganda intended to undermine the Cuban government via Radio and TV
Marti (both bankrolled by the US government to the tune of $37 million to
broadcast anti-Cuban propaganda from the States onto Cuban soil).
The news mercenaries' covert employer was exposed by documents obtained
through the Freedom of Information Act. Three were fired from El Nuevo
Herald, the Spanish-language sister paper of the Miami Herald:
columnist Pablo Alfonso, staff reporter Wilfredo Cancio and freelancer Olga
Connor.
Pablo Alfonso, who wrote an opinion column, received $175,000 since
2001.
Perusing Alfonso's columns in Spanish, I found them to be concerned
with trivial and titillating gossip of possible interest only to
resentful exiles. The columns whispered about an alleged dairy farm,
maintained solely for private catering to Castro's taste for the freshest
strawberry yogurt and camembert cheeses.
Other fluff items included speculations on the "secrecy" -- perhaps
nepotism -- surrounding the professional activities of Castro's tribe of
grandchildren (all apparently respectably employed in Cuba or abroad in
various non-subversive scientific fields).
Another provocation to outrage included Castro's alleged failure to
effect a promised "energy revolution" because a power outage of four hours
had crippled three provinces in June. My hunch is that Castro's "energy
revolution" might have been referring to the one promised by ongoing
off-shore, deep-sea explorations for oil and gas effected through an
agreement with an Indian oil exploration company.
The most ironic of Alfonso's silly charges was the one stating that the
newspaper, Granma, acted as a stenographer for Raul Castro's recent
"declarations" and "interviews," upon assuming leadership of the Cuban
nation, absent the convalescing Fidel Castro.
Of the bribed journalists mentioned by the US national media this
morning (11 September 2006) -- the names of all 10 were reported by the
Miami Herald. El Nuevo Herald's Olga Connor, a freelance journalist,
received $71,,000 from the US Office of Cuba Broadcasting since 2001; Nuevo
Herald staff reporter Wilfredo Cancio Isla received $15,000 for the same
period. Additional US news mercenaries were opinion page editor for
Diario Las Americas Helen Aguirre Ferre and reporter/columnist Ariel
Remos.
What struck me about this news coverage, however, was the absence of
detailed coverage for Carlos Alberto Montaner, surely one of the most
world-prominent of the Miami 10. A militant anti-Castroist, sentenced to
20 years of imprisonment by the Cuban revolutionary government in 1960
for "conspiring against the power of the state," Montaner has lived
two-thirds of his life in exile. Now residing in Spain, he's founder and
president of the Unión Liberal Cubana (Cuban Liberal Union). In Spain, he
writes for ABC (the former mouthpiece for Francisco Franco, the
Falangist Spanish dictator). An admiring website claimed that "his syndicated
column is read by six million readers. His opinions make politician[s]
in Spain and Latin America tremble. . . . He maintains his position as
one of the regions most respected journalists."
Perhaps, but now he'll have to maintain it in the face of this recent
exposure of his being in the pay of the US government. When he claims
that Fidel Castro's "cancer will deliver justice," as he does in his
columns, the alleged cancer's war on Fidel might suggest that it is
diagnosed by a close collaborator of the US government. If Caracas indeed
"will shiver with Castro's death," as Montaner predicts, readers might
wonder with whom this drivel of wishful thinking is intended to curry
favor. "The [Cuban]army's loyalty ends with Fidel's life" makes you wonder
if another Bay of Pigs US debacle fueled by anti-revolutionary,
out-of-touch, diehards in exile is in the offing -- or if the myth of a
military coup is the result of too many years of mojito drinking, coupled with
frustrated hopes among UUS-supported Cuban exiles' intriguers and
illusionists.
"Democracy can arrive on the island via a pact with reformists,"
Montaner opines. Which "reformists"? The former Cuban estate landlords and
clients of US multi-national exploiters in Miami? Or the "reformists"
generated and proliferated by the $10 million initiative to foment
"dissidence" in Cuba by the US Special Interests Office in Havana?
Actually, Cuban government officials have been arguing for decades that
Montaner is far from a liberal paladin of human rights and democracy.
They say that he's very close to known international terrorists such as
Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, responsible for the deaths of
hundreds of people. He's an agent of the CIA, the Cubans insist. He has
ties to the NGO, Reporters without Borders, which, last year, admitted
it is financed by the CIA.
Reporters without Borders mounted a campaign in 2002 characterizing the
trial and imprisonment in Cuba of more than two dozen journalists,
among 75 "dissidents," as a violation of human rights. The Cuban government
insisted that the accused were mercenary agitators paid by the US to
pose as "independent journalists." As Granma reported, "none of them even
passed through a journalism faculty or school of journalism and never
wrote a single line of journalism."
Now whom are we to believe, in this matter of human-rights violations
by Cuba? The Cuban officials or the purveyors of democracy in the "free
press" paid for by the US government -- not exactly distinguished by
its regard for truth?
Further Reading
"Cuba after Fide1," Le Monde Diplomatique, 1 Sept. 2006
*Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of
Pennsylvania. She can be reached at
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
Ten anti-Castro "journalists" in South Florida
on US government payroll
By Luciana Bohne
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1207.s |
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