“The Government of Cuba and The Ocean Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) today,” announced The Ocean Foundation last week, “one that marks the first time the Government of Cuba has signed a MoU with a non-governmental organization in the United States. ..The MoU draws on over thirty years of collaborative ocean science and policy work between the organization and Cuban marine research institutions and conservation agencies.”
A prime example of that “cooperation” was a CBS "60 Minutes" program back in December of 2011 featuring another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. On that program, Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime’s Centro de Investigaciones Marinas for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful Communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C. who chairs its “Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program.” Dr Guggenheim bills himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasted Castro’s fiefdom (which he proudly claimed to have visited over 40 times) as a “magical place!”
Needless to remind, such a gold-plated visa is not handed-out haphazardly by the totalitarian Castro regime. And such a welcome mat and red carpet are not rolled out randomly.
After surfacing from their scuba dive at Jardines de la Reina reef off southern Cuba, Cooper and Guggenheim of The Ocean Foundation rhapsodized for the CBS cameras thusly:
Guggenheim: “The corals are healthy. The fish are healthy and abundant. There are predators here, large sharks. It's the way these ecosystems really should look.”
Anderson Cooper: “You're saying this is like a time capsule, almost?”
Guggenheim: “It's a living time machine. And it's a really incredible opportunity to learn from.”
Cooper: “So something here holds the key to figuring out how to save other reefs and bring them back.”
Guggenheim: “it's because this ecosystem is being protected, it's got a leg up on other ecosystems around the world that are being heavily fished.”
Yes, amazing how that Communist conservation works! You simply convert free citizens of a nation which formerly enjoyed a higher per-capita income and car-ownership than half of Europeans, and with the third highest protein consumption in Latin American, into penurious half-starved serfs! Nothing to it!
In pre-Castro Cuba, the abundant lobster, grouper and snapper that so enchanted Cooper and Guggenheim on their scuba dive served as dietary mainstays of the humblest Cuban, who owned boats, fishing gear and were perfectly free to use them at every whim and then consume their catch. For Cuban landlubbers, pre-Castro groceries stocked seafood in abundance. Now these delicacies are reserved mostly for tourists, regime apparatchiks and valued foreign propagandists. Catching and eating a lobster can land a Castro subject in jail. And owning even a dinghy is the stuff of dreams, of escape.
“In 1996, the government of Fidel Castro, a diver himself, made this area one of the largest marine preserves in the Caribbean. Almost all commercial fishing was banned,” explained a smug Cooper to his "60 Minutes" audience.
Yes, amazing how that works in Stalinist Cuba! “Ah! Think I’ll decree my favorite diving and fishing site a preserve that prohibits my subjects from doing there what I do,” brainstorms the Lider Maximo (translates into German almost precisely as Fuhrer) one fine afternoon, then presents it to his “parliament”… “Now, do I hear any objections?...No?.. No?! OK, going once, going twice…The motion passes!”
There’s just something about running a KGB-tutored Stalinist regime that encourages this type of instant and gung-ho team-playing by regime “legislators.” Many among the tens of thousands of Castro’s prison, torture and firing squad victims were his former comrades, onetime regime officials. Unlike food, clothing, shelter, feminine napkins and toilet paper, one thing there’s never any shortage of in Stalinist Cuba is rubber stamps. Not that CBS or The Ocean Foundation even hinted at such unpleasantness.
Apartheid South Africa, by the way, did a bang-up job of wildlife conservation. The segregationist governments set up many national parks and nature preserves where vigilant police kept poaching to a minimum. Came the end of apartheid and the enfranchisement of South Africa’s black population and poaching became rampant for a while, with the populations of many endangered species (rhinos in particular) plummeting.
But extolling Apartheid South Africa’s “conservation consciousness,” by the mainstream media wasn’t much in evidence during the 1980s. Apparently, in the view of enlightened opinion worldwide, the vileness of that government’s segregationist policies negated the virtue of its conservation policies. If only Stalinist policies were regarded similarly by enlightened opinion worldwide. If only a totalitarian Cuban regime that jailed and murdered political prisoners at 10 times the rate of an authoritarian South African regime provoked a tiny fraction of the revulsion as the latter among the “enlightened” worldwide.
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