Via Jack Shafer’s Twitter feed, this AP story on Fidel Castro’s decision to fill three of the eight scant pages in the party-controlled newspaper Granma with nonsense from 9/11 Truther and Bilderberg conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin. AP writer Will Weissert does a nice job detailing how Estulin’s work actually draws on the thinking (rather, “thinking”) of the extremist right.
I’m glad to see that the Obama administration is moving to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. And yet I’m still amazed that there are those on the left who continue to admire Castro, this pitiful crackpot, who has long outlawed the very existence of a journalistic culture on the island, preferring to force-feed the Cuban people his own ravings, along with the ravings of fellow loons.
I know, journalism in the U.S. is anything but perfect, but the quick dissemination of news and debate fostered by the Net — and the enormous flux in media and information cultures detailed in this very interesting pair of pieces in Wired (hat tip John Murph) — couldn’t stand in starker contrast to the utterly shriveled, hideous excuse for a media outlet that is Granma. And every other official organ like it elsewhere on the planet.
Read Chris Anderson’s thoughts on iPads and RSS feeds and Pandora and the like. And then recall that the Cuban government took the enormous step of legalizing cell phones in 2008. We thought it was right-wing anticommunists, per William F. Buckley, who “stood astride history, yelling ‘Stop!’” Turns out it’s actually the communists. (Of course, America’s Castro apologists benefit from cutting-edge online communication to get their organizing done.)
By the way, Castro’s not the only one spouting laughable conspiracist rot. Hugo Chávez, we learn in this valuable piece by Christopher Hitchens, believes the moon landing may not have actually happened. But the most amusing part of Hitchens’s account is how deeply, how desperately, Sean Penn wants to believe in Chávez’s political sanity, all evidence to the contrary.
Via NYT’s The Lede, President Obama has directly addressed questions posed by courageous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who was recently harassed and roughed up by Cuban security officials for the great crime of blogging.
The NYT post also remarks on a new Human Rights Watch report titled “New Castro, Same Cuba,” the thrust of which I don’t need to spell out.
U.S.-based campaigners against the Cuba embargo often rail against travel restrictions imposed on artists, stultifying cultural exchange. And rightly so. But any effort that paints the U.S. as the sole offender, and fails to make equal mention of Cuba’s own draconian and undemocratic policies, is misleading and worthy of suspicion.
The [HRW] report notes that denying outspoken critics of the government permission to travel abroad is a common tactic. In addition to keeping Ms. Sánchez from going to both Spain and the United States to accept journalism awards, the report notes that last year “the rapper Bian Oscar Rodríguez Galá — a member of the group los Aldeanos (the Villagers), whose lyrics have been overtly critical of the Castro government — was denied permission to leave Cuba for the second consecutive year to participate in an annual international music competition. Rodríguez, who had qualified by winning a rap competition in Cuba, was refused an exit visa despite having provided all of the required documents.”
President Obama is taking heat from Newt Gingrich and others for shaking hands with Hugo Chavez and “making nice” with Cuba, etc. Since I’m a dogged liberal opponent of those two particular regimes, let me say I support Obama’s moves and think the Republicans are full of it. It was Chavez who approached Obama at the Trinidad summit, not the other way around. Had Obama shunned him in that context, it would have been an international incident and an embarrassment. On Cuba, Obama is not “making nice” — on the contrary, it is Raul Castro who is making nice, and who has little choice but to do so. In setting a new tone from Washington, Obama has the upper hand.
On Eduardo Galeano, the author of the book Chavez presented to Obama: Eamonn recently translated and fisked a Galeano column which trotted out the canard that Palestinians can’t be antisemites because they are Semites. Intellectual honesty is not the man’s strong suit.
As they say in Spanish. What balls. Fidel Castro is not satisfied with President Obama’s steps to relax the Cuban embargo. Apparently the U.S. needs to live up to Castro’s high ethical standards:
Castro responded to the measures in an online column Monday night, writing that the U.S. had announced the repeal of ”several hateful restrictions,” but had stopped short of real change.
This from the only person in Cuba who is permitted to express his opinion via an online column.
”Of the blockade, which is the cruelest of measures, not a word was uttered,” the 82-year-old former president wrote.
Go to Human Rights Watch and read some reports on Cuba if you’d like to learn about cruel measures.
”The conditions are in place for Obama to use his talent in a constructive policy that ends something that has failed for nearly half a century,” [Castro] wrote.
Something that has failed for nearly half a century! Too much irony… make it stop…
Castro also said Cuba would like to hear ”some self-criticism” by the U.S. for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion 48 years ago and a guarantee that it won’t happen again in the hemisphere.
This is what bothers me about the stateside campaign to lift the embargo, and I say it as someone who wants to see the embargo lifted, for cultural/artistic reasons if for nothing else. I don’t like how the anti-embargo calls can play into Castro’s hands, as in the quote above, putting the moral onus entirely on the United States. Mr. Castro, you too have an embargo in place — an embargo on thought. Lift it.
The embargo -- rationalized as a measure to destabilize the Cuban dictatorship-- is, in reality, the glue that continues to hold the whole shoddy show together. The now-phantom threat of U.S. invasion and the economic sting of the embargo, is a wonderful nationalist bonding agent -- about the last weapon left in the political arsenal of the Castro Brothers. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
Obama's move Monday, his clean break with the last half-century of American policy, in itself begins to rob the Cuban government of its convenient bogeyman. [...]
So those of us who wish to lift the embargo now have the
obligation to demand that the Cuban government start to make some tangible concessions toward democratization.
“Dude, he’s a dictator.” That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s refreshingly simple takedown of Representative Bobby Rush, who has expressed the highest regard for Fidel Castro after a trip to Cuba. Rush has long availed himself of the right to participate in democratic elections in the United States. Yet he has no problem heaping praise on a man who has denied Cubans the same right for 50 years. This sort of hypocrisy runs deep in left-wing culture; it needs to be exposed and combatted, for the sake of the left. (Of course, we should expect nothing less from Rush, who used the word “lynching” in order to cow critics of the reprehensible, stinking corruption that made Roland Burris a Senator.)
…it’s weak to act like Castro is consistent with best of the progressive tradition. It’s weak to call out Dick Cheney here, and cheer on Castro over there. It’s weak to shout apartheid at Israel, and then turn around and applaud Castro. It’s weak to say, “Yeah, I hear you but…” Either repressively ruling a country for half a century and then conspiring to pass power to your brother, is wrong or it isn’t. We have to choose. Or we have to be jesters.
I don’t usually cite the New York Post‘s Page Six, but that’s where celebrity flaps are covered, and Sean Penn is nothing if not a celebrity. So it’s good to see someone pointing out James Kirchick’s entirely correct assessment of the recent Penn-Castro-Chávez affair in The Advocate. Says Kirchick: ”Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both when he rationalizes illiberal ideologies as ‘anti-imperialist’ and rushes to the defense of thugs who posture as victims of the West.”
Sean Penn’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, has cried foul:
Kirchick’s commentary about Sean Penn’s cover story neglects to include that Penn in fact addressed the issue of oppression toward homosexuals in Cuba in his full essay which was printed on the Huffington Post site on Dec. 1.
Here in the HuffPo essay, Penn does indeed mention his then 14-year-old daughter’s (not his own) concern with Cuban oppression of homosexuals. She’s the one who puts the question to Fidel Castro in the flesh. Then Penn throws his daughter under the bus by regurgitating Fidel’s spin on the matter, which amounts to “mistakes were made.” Penn concludes: “My daughter was disarmed….” It’s quite a moment: Penn seems more admiring toward the dictator than toward his precocious and morally perceptive teenager.
P.S. Marc Cooper on the new Che film. And George Packer, a real foreign correspondent, rips into Penn.
P.P.S. A reminder that when Chávez recently ejected two Human Rights Watch officials from Venezuela, a pro-Chávez legislator made allusions to the two officials having gay sex in their hotel room. Sean Penn, supposed gay-rights advocate, supports the Chávez regime.
~ Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez and her brave comrades have managed, despite open intimidation by the regime, to institute a clandestine bloggers’ “knowledge workshop.” Says Sánchez: “We ended up finding the cracks between the fingers of the censors, between which the fine sand of information and knowledge has managed to slip through.” Sean Penn, writing prominently for The Nation, bent over backwards in sympathy with the dictatorship that is trying to shut Sánchez down.
~ Patricia Nicholson Parker and colleagues are trying to get a Center for Innovative Arts built and sustained on the Lower East Side. Big fundraiser on December 15, Salman Rushdie on the Host Committee. (Here at Lerterland we endorse Salman Rushdie.)
There’s little I can say about Sean Penn’s fluff “interview” with Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro that Marc Cooper hasn’t said.
Some have suggested that I tend to overstate the influence of actor-activists like Penn. If anything, I’ve understated it. Penn’s “journalism” is now being published on the cover of The Nation, right at the moment when audiences are swooning over his film portrayal of the late Harvey Milk. The damage he’s doing to the very idea of the left as a principled force for human rights is considerable.
One would never know from Penn’s article that Chávez has summarily ejected Human Rights Watch officials from his country; has proclaimed Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko “a model social state”; has pledged solidarity with Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Vladimir Putin. Do not even get me started about Castro, whose decades-long erasure of civil liberties is treated by Penn only in the most evasive, relativizing way. All societies are “imperfect,” he counsels. I can’t imagine a moral stand more limp and spineless.
Because Chávez and Castro are demonized by Fox News and other right-wing forces, Penn has concluded they must in fact be stand-up guys. What an infantile and dishonest view of world politics. What a catastrophe for the left, which has been down this road before.
Odd that Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Brinkley accompanied Penn on this trip; I eagerly await their sides of the story.
A minor point: I would expect Penn to have no idea what the Monroe Doctrine is; perhaps he’s misremembering Brinkley’s remarks, which are clearly about the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was not imperialist, but rather anti-imperialist, stating that Europe should have limited influence in the New World. It was Theodore Roosevelt who tweaked the doctrine to justify U.S. intervention in Latin America.
Peter Phillips of Project Censored has responded to my critique, in which I point out that the director of an entity nominally devoted to fighting censorship actually supports censorship, as long as it’s done in Cuba. You’ll find Phillip’s largely boilerplate response, which fails to engage any of the points I made, at the bottom of the original post. He notes that Project Censored and his own reporting work are two different things. Yet his work appears prominently on the Project Censored website and clearly carries its imprimatur.
Phillips accuses me of “bias,” which is rich coming from someone who undertakes a reporting trip to Cuba to meet with journalists who are either sympathetic to the regime, or unable or unwilling to share any dissenting views, and then concludes that Cuban journalists willingly censor themselves so as not to aid in any “counter-revolutionary” plots. Right. For a supposed foe of censorship, by the way, to throw around the Stalinist term “counter-revolutionary” in the year 2008 is also noteworthy.
Phillips asserts that Project Censored has elicited only a “handfull [sic] of negative stories on just of few of our reports,” which says a good deal about the preach-to-the-choir culture of the left and very little about the merit of PC’s work.
While I’m on the subject of hypocrisy on censorship…
I’m listening to There’s Me and There’s You, the forthcoming release by the Matthew Herbert Big Band. I like Herbert’s music; I’m intrigued by his process. His Chomskyite politics I can do without, although I agree with the statement on his album cover, which takes the form of a personnel list presented as a mock-petition: “We, the undersigned, believe that music can still be a political force of note and not just the soundtrack to over-consumption.”
The leadoff track, “The Story,” comes with a written admonishment from Herbert that we visit the website for Project Censored. For years, Project Censored, a nonprofit affiliated with Sonoma State University, has compiled a list of top-25 news stories that, if not censored outright, were underreported or overlooked by the mainstream media in the U.S.
Herbert’s listeners will want to consider that Project Censored has come under withering criticism of late from people on the progressive left, and for good reason. Back in 2000, Brooke Shelby Biggs of Mother Jonescalled PC’s annual list misleading, redundant and “a thinly veiled excuse for an alternative press self-love-fest.” Far more damningly, David Walls, writing in New Politics in 2002, detailed “how Project Censored joined the whitewash of Serb atrocities.” He demonstrated that PC has “departed the terrain of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.” As if to prove the point, Project Censored included on its 2007 list of top “censored” stories the theories of 9/11 Truth huckster Steven Jones, a decision which prompted the resignation of judges Robert Jensen and Norman Solomon.
But a glance at PC’s website reveals the most salient thing of all: much like the Clear Skies Act, Project Censored actually does the opposite of what its name suggests.
Director Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State, visited Cuba in May of this year and wrote this Potemkin village report under the headline “Cuba Supports Press Freedom” — a manifest lie, as this Human Rights Watch dispatch (“Fidel Castro’s Abusive Machinery Remains Intact”) spells out. Phillips mocked the idea that Cuban journalists labor under a “Stalinist media system,” which they most certainly do, and wrote:
Nonetheless it did became clear that Cuban journalists share a common sense of a continuing counter-revolutionary threat by US financed Cuban-Americans living in Miami. This is not an entirely unwarranted feeling in that many hundreds of terrorist actions against Cuba have occurred with US backing over the past fifty years. [...]
In the context of this external threat, Cuban journalists quietly acknowledge that some self-censorship will undoubtedly occur regarding news stories that could be used by the “enemy” against the Cuban people. Nonetheless, Cuban journalists strongly value freedom of the press and there was no evidence of overt restriction or government control.
This is practically stenography dictated by the Cuban regime. More to the point, Phillipsaccepts, without a hint of skepticism, the disingenuous argument the regime has long used to justify media crackdowns. Put another way, the director of Project Censored supports censorship. He goes on to insist, astonishingly, that the U.S. “honor the Cuban peoples choice of a socialist system.”
Here is Human Rights Watch on the “choices” available to the Cuban people: “For almost five decades, Cuba has restricted nearly all avenues of political dissent. Cuban citizens have been systematically deprived of their fundamental rights to free expression, privacy, association, assembly, movement, and due process of law. Tactics for enforcing political conformity have included police warnings, surveillance, short-term detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions, and politically motivated dismissals from employment.”
It’s clear that Project Censored, under Phillips’s leadership, has no regard for democracy and no principles or moral credibility on the subject of censorship. As for Matthew Herbert, he should reexamine his own criteria before telling the rest of us what we should be reading.
Via Jack Shafer’s Twitter feed, this AP story on Fidel Castro’s decision to fill three of the eight scant pages in the party-controlled newspaper Granma with nonsense from 9/11 Truther and Bilderberg conspiracy theorist Daniel Estulin. AP writer Will Weissert does a nice job detailing how Estulin’s work actually draws on the thinking (rather, “thinking”) of the extremist right.