This week the New York Times ran two editorials pleading for a U.S. economic lifeline to the Castro brothers’ terror-sponsoring regime (i.e. to end the so-called embargo.) One editorial ran on Sunday the other on Tuesday. The second editorial contains the following:
“Fidel Castro…has largely vanished from public view in Cuba. But the 88-year-old former president (italics mine) has not altogether abandoned the business of telling Cubans what to think.”
Is the Times --at long last!--acknowledging a totalitarian streak in the longest-reigning Stalinist dictator of modern history? Sure sounds like it. Now please pay close attention as the editorial continues:
“On Tuesday, Mr. Castro dedicated a column to an editorial published in The (New York) Times on Sunday that called on the Obama administration to restore diplomatic ties with the Cuban government and end the counterproductive (italics mine) embargo the United States has imposed on the island for decades. His take was remarkable for one main reason…quoting nearly every paragraph in the (our) editorial…Hosts of Cuban state-run radio stations (also) read Mr. Castro’s column and discussed its content…”
In brief: so closely did the New York Times echo the sentiments of a Stalinist dictator that he gleefully ordered their article disseminated—almost word for word-- throughout his regime’s KGB-founded and mentored media. It gets better:
“He (Fidel Castro) appeared to endorse the thrust of the editorial,” The second NY Times editorial boasts, “comparing it to an interview he gave in 1957 as a young rebel leader to a (New York) Times foreign correspondent at the time, Herbert Matthews…”
In April of 1959--amidst an appalling bloodbath of Cubans by firing squad ordered by Fidel Castro but mostly administered by his ever-faithful Igor, Che Guevara--Castro made a special visit to the New York Times offices in New York. After a warm greeting from Arthur Hayes Sulzberger a beaming Fidel Castro personally decorated a beaming Herbert Matthews with a specially-minted medal expressing his bloody regime’s highest honor.
“To our American friend Herbert Matthews with gratitude,” beamed Castro as the flashbulbs popped. “Without your help, and without the help of the New York Times, the Revolution in Cuba would never have been.”
“Fidel Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy and social justice,” Matthews had written on the front pages of (at the time) the world’s most prestigious newspaper in February 1957. “But it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-communist.”
Herbert Matthews double-downed a few months later: “This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the term. Fidel Castro is not only not a Communist, he is decidedly anti-Communist.” (Herbert Matthews, the New York Times, July 1959.)
Reasonable people might ask: has any tiny little thing transpired in the intervening half-century that might cause the New York Times to regret their enabling of Fidel Castro?
But reasonable people will search in utter vain for any hint of such regret, especially in light of this week’s editorials which –if anything--double-down on the New York Times historical fondness for the Castro regime.
Through their unrivaled (at the time) public relations cachet’ and their heavy influence with their ideological cohorts and cronies in the CIA and U.S. State Department the New York Times. enabled into power a regime that:
*Jailed and tortured political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror.
*Murdered more Cubans than Hitler’s murdered Germans during the Night of Long Knives.
* In the above process converted a nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe into one that repulses Haitians.
* Wantonly brought the world within a whisker of nuclear war.
Over fifty times as many Cubans have died (and horribly) while attempting to flee Castro’s Cuba as Germans died trying to flee East Germany. And prior to Castroism Cuba welcomed more immigrants per-capita (primarily from Europe) than did the U.S.
And remember, the New York Times like all anti-embargo propagandists (Chamber of Commerce, Hillary Clinton, Brookings Inst., CATO Inst., etc.) advocate against the so-called embargo (in fact, the flow of cash and visitors from the U.S. to Cuba during the Obama administration exceeds the flow in the 1950’s) by claiming Castro secretly favors it. The embargo-- the intellectual eggheads wink and snicker at us knuckle-draggers-- gives Castro a foil for his economic failures and an excuse to keep the clamps on. “Don’t you blockheads understand?”.
We’re greatly impressed with your erudition and powers of ratiocination and especially the nasal tone of its expression, Think-Tank eggheads. But first off, if Castro “secretly favors the embargo,” then why did every one of his secret agents campaign secretly and obsessively against the embargo while working as secret agents? Castro managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as "Castro’s Queen Jewel" in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenberg’s.
Prior to her visit from the FBI and handcuffing, Ana Belen Montes worked tirelessly to influence U.S. foreign policy against the embargo. The same holds for more recently arrested, convicted and incarcerated Cuban spies Carlos and Elsa Alvarez and Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers. All of these worked tirelessly to influence U.S. policy against the "embargo"-- while working as secret agents.
In brief, the “reasoning” against the so-called embargo by people who fancy themselves intellectuals calls for Rod Serling introducing a Twilight Zone episode:
"Imagine if you will...a place where every "prestigious" Think-Tank (from Brookings to CATO) and every "prestigious" publication (from the New York Times to The Atlantic) denounces the Cuba "embargo" as "Castro's best-friend, a policy he secretly favors"--even when every one of Castro’s convicted secret agents campaigned secretly and obsessively against the embargo while working as secret agents. On top of that, the KGB-mentored media of Castro's totalitarian regime makes it a point to reprint every "end-the-embargo" article ever printed in the world, especially those by the New York Times...
Imagine if you will...a place where the institutions that call the embargo "Castro's Best-Friend" still manage to be known as “Think-Tanks.”
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