Zone of Reality: Castro Notes

This first appeared on October 31, 2009. Has anything really changed with the Main Stream Media? RK

When Fidel Castro Dictated to the Old U.S. Media
By Humberto Fontova

We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles. (Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954)

A foreign reporter -- preferably American -- was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda. (Ernesto "Che" Guevara in his diaries.)

In all essentials Castro's battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign fought in New York and Washington. (British historian Hugh Thomas)

Fought and handily won, I might add, as already explained here.

But even after the victory, Castro's U.S. public relations auxiliaries remained on call and primed for duty. By the time of Castro's delirious, deafening, foot-stomping reception at Harvard Law School and Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club (most of whose members oppose capital punishment) in April 1959, Castro's firing squads had slaughtered 1,168 men -- and boys, some as young as fifteen. And for months, Fidel, Raul, and Che had been repairing to their respective stolen mansions nightly to meet with Soviet G.R.U agents and button down the Stalinization of Cuba....But as Diaz-Lanz warned, when outing Communists, their denial is only half the story. The truth-teller must also be slandered, smeared, defamed, and his character assassinated -- as surely as the hundreds of men and boys then being physically assassinated by Che Guevara's firing squads. Not to worry...the U.S. media of the time was eminently worthy of the task....

For those of us who are older and remember about the Pulitzer Prize winning Walter Lippman you will see that the left wing media has always been where it is currently. Now that they have been exposed they are even more virulent than ever. As Fontova says in this article; "In wistful moments, I imagine Rush, Beck, Hannity, etc. on the U.S. media roster when Pedro Diaz-Lanz burst upon the U.S. political scene with some pretty important revelations." RK