US Remains Stuck in the Past Cuba Changes By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON VALDÉS

[flamingdem]

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau06032011.html

The US has got to get on its toes and not take Cuba for granted or the Chinese will be 90 miles away in business suits, wtih mojitos in hand.. In fact they already are..

--excerpt
President Obama and his advisers share with most of the mass media the same visual weakness when it comes to Cuba: they don’t see the obvious, the crucial facts and context that stare them in the face.

As Cuba begins to undergo basic changes to its economy and governmental structure, the reporting from western media follows predictably context-free and thus irrelevant standards.

For more than a half-century, most writers and radio and TV producers have had a conscious or unacknowledged stake in the failure of the Cuban revolution. To think otherwise, reporters and advisers have learned, would be a bad career move. In order to invalidate Cuba’s attempt to change the social relation of its society and spread its word to the rest of the third world the western media has consistently failed to place a context around the events that led up to the revolution. Instead, Washington and the stenographers called “the press” judge Cuba’s revolution by U.S. standards and in the U.S. context. Cuba must always perform according to what the media assume are standards of democratic perfection. This criteria for judging, beyond its vagueness, leads one to wonder about values and priorities.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Two of the finest journalists available on Cuban matters, writing in the U.S.

Thanks for this article.

Recommend.