When Cubans protested this Platt Amendment, the Chicago Tribune editorialized "The United States reserved the right to intervene...to preserve public order"We are the parent, Cuba is the child, and the child is about due for a good spanking" (p. 67). Cuban "independence," as written into their constitution, meant Cubans did not have the right to protest without risking foreign intervention. For the corporate media, Cuba was to be eternally grateful to the US for its freedom and independence, and to consider US domination as benign and progressive.
Bolender quotes Walter Cronkite on the US attitude towards Cuba before the revolution: "Cuba was a resort land for Americans...it was just a part of America, we kind of considered it part of the United States".The country was a little colony"(p. 74).
Then came 1959 and Fidel Castro responded to racist imperial patronizing with the simple truth: "I believe that this country has the same rights of other countries to govern itself" (p. 68). By the end of 1960 media coverage of Cuba was telling us Fidel Castro was crazy. In the world of corporate media fake news, all leaders who oppose or criticize US dictates and bullying are called madmen. The media transformed Cuba from a welcoming tourist playground into an armed camp, a repressive Communist state, a colony of the Soviet Union. The media "went on a rampage of misinformation and outright falsehoods about the Cuban Revolution that persists to this day" (p.75).
That Cuba must conform to US imperial standards, nothing less, has been an unchanged US policy from 1898 to the present.
Our Susceptibility to US Disinformation Campaigns
We should never underestimate the shrewdness of US disinformation, with has affected Bolender to a degree. For example, Bolender describes USAID's Zunzuneo project as analogous to Russian social media operations in 2016 (p.188). In reality, this entire Russiagate story itself was a disinformation campaign. Bolender again falls for corporate media disinformation by calling the US-NATO war on Syria a "civil war" (p.6). We can be quite knowledgeable about some disinformation campaigns, but even the most astute among us can be taken in by others.
Bolender mentions "The decision by the Castro government to embrace Soviet orthodoxy" occurred after the Bay of Pigs invasion. He does not explain what is signified by this "Soviet orthodoxy." Nevertheless, Cuba did not become closely aligned with the Soviet Union almost ten years after the 1961 invasion. During the 1960s, a fair amount of discord punctuated the relations between the two countries: Khrushchev unilaterally removing missiles, the split in the Communist bloc, sharp disagreements over guerilla warfare, the Warsaw Pact 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, the defense of Vietnam, the 1967 crackdown the pro-Soviet Anibal Escalante faction in the Cuban CP.
Bolender sees "a softening, even a balance of coverage when examining specific incidents, such as Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban Five and even the Alan Gross affair." (p.176) I do not agree. The public regarded Elian's case as a father unfairly being kept from his son, and as the US government not defending family and parental rights. People could not be sold on the attempt to view it through a "Communist Cuba vs. US freedom" lens. Having worked on the Cuban Five case for twelve years, I observed no opening of coverage on the case. Outside of Miami the corporate media maintained a black out. We even had to raise funds to pay the New York Times to publish a factual account on the Cuban Five.
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