CBS: 'Cubans Look for "Change" to Believe In'

Photo of Ken Shepherd.
By Ken Shepherd (Bio | Archive)
January 20, 2009 - 15:50 ET

CBSNews.com greets readers of its World Watch blog today with, "Cubans Look For 'Change' To Believe In."

The blog post by Havana-based Portia Siegelbaum began by insisting that: 

Expectations are almost as high among Cubans as they are among Americans as the countdown to the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama speeds up. 

Of course, far-left rhetoric notwithstanding, the United States is a republic with two major parties and a healthy tradition of freedom of speech and press, whereas Cuba is a totalitarian throwback to the Soviet era.

Yet Siegelbaum failed to note that President Raul Castro is a dictator unanswerable to the call of change from his people.

What's more, the CBS reporter practically laid the entire blame for Cuba's poor economy not on the failures of Communism and dictatorship but the long-standing U.S. embargo:

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Cuban President Raul Castro (at left), like his brother Fidel before him, has successfully blamed many of his country's problems on the embargo, and almost all Cubans believe life would be easier and shortages would disappear if relations with their large neighbor to the north were normalized.

Most of the world seems to agree. At a Latin American summit in Brazil at the end of December, 33 Caribbean and Latin American nations called for an end to the embargo and for the past consecutive 17 years the United Nations General Assembly has weighed in against it — the most recent vote was 185-3.

It gets worse:

On a human level, U.S. policy has meant dividing families.

For Felicita Rodriguez, a 55-year-old Havana shop clerk, the fundamental problem is "travel and remittances." Both were severely restricted in May 2004, when outgoing President George Bush limited Cuban American visits to one, two-week visit every three years, and only if they had immediate family living on the island. The policy blotted out aunts, uncles and cousins with the stroke of a pen.

Of course the CBS reporter failed to account for how, say, political imprisonments and spurious executions at the hand of the Castro government have divided families.

—Ken Shepherd is Managing Editor of NewsBusters


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My DEAD CASTRO party will be ROCKIN' OUT ...

January 20, 2009 - 16:15 ET by Jayke

... any day now!  I will also be holding auditions for my new band THE DEAD CASTROS.  "When the wicked perish, there is joyful shouting" (Proverbs 11:10).  By the way, I know first hand about the failures of communism in Cuba.  COMMUNISM IS A FAILURE EVERYWHERE IT IS IMPOSED as it is never adopted.  The only disgrace is that America didn't topple the CASTROS like they did SADDAM.  I blame that on JFK and the dems.

Cuba - Can't even grow and raise their own food.

January 20, 2009 - 16:28 ET by Gary Hall

All that should be reflected on is the complete failure of the Castro/Castro regime to pull anything off but, oppression and desperation.

How this perfectly situated and constructed tropical island, with all it's humble servants working together under the strong hand of it's "visionary" leader, Castro,  who devoted all to develop an economy based on a model farming commune, can't even manage after 50 years to grow an raise it's own food, is more than a bit telling.

I grabbed this excerpt from the LA Times  (not that this was the point of the piece) last spring.

"That Cuba produces so little of the food it needs despite a year-round growing climate is one of the nagging forces driving Castro to shake up the status quo in the countryside. Cuba imports more than 80% of the commodities distributed in the monthly ration basket, notes Paolo Spadoni, an expert on the Cuban economy who teaches at Rollins College in central Florida. He estimates that food imports cost Havana more than $1.6 billion a year.

In an effort to dramatically expand crop output, the leadership has begun making more land available to farmers and allowing them to sell fruit, vegetables, meat and milk at prices set according to demand, instead of government edict."

 

Any idiot can understand what went wrong.. well, perhaps not CBS. 

I could do better than that in my back yard. The problem is Castro - the problem is the system he chose, communism and dictatorship, not the U.S. embargo.

The only "change" I see coming as it relates to the USA and Cuba

January 20, 2009 - 16:42 ET by R D Helm

...is that America is going to start looking less and less like America and more like Cuba.

-Dave

“Them that’s going get on the wagon. Them that ain’t get out of the way.” -While there is still time.

Except for the USA, Cuba

January 20, 2009 - 20:53 ET by stratman

Except for the USA, Cuba enjoys trade with the rest of the world.  They even have Cocoa-Cola and other "American" goods available for sale (though only the wealthy ruling party and tourists can afford most anything).

It is a rank lie that America's embargo causes Cuban deaths, hunger or economic hardships.

The truth is that Fidel and Communism have harmed and killed the Cuban people, either through direct violence by Fidel's henchmen or via Communist policies resulting in zero to trade with other countries.