The Blackout on Cuban Aid to Haiti

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/lindorff01192010.html


In the critical first days after the quake struck Haiti, only two US corporate media news organizations reported on Cuba’s quick response to the crisis. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.

The Christian Science Monitor, in a second article, quoted Laurence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense and now based at the Center for American Progress, as saying that the US, which is leading the relief efforts in Haiti, should “consider tapping the expertise of neighboring Cuba,” which he noted, “has some of the best doctors in the world--we should see about flying them in.”

As for the rest of the US corporate media, they simply ignored Cuba.

In fact, left unmentioned was the reality that Cuba already had nearly 400 doctors, EMTs and other medical personnel posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and that those professionals were the first to respond to the disaster, setting up a hospital right next to the main hospital in Port-au-Prince which collapsed in the earthquake, as well as a second tent-hospital elsewhere in the stricken city.

-snip-

It’s not that the Cubans were hard to find in Port-au-Prince. Democracy Now! had a report, as did the Washington-based magazine Cuba News. It’s just that telling Americans about the good works of a poor and unashamedly Communist nation is not a story that the American corporate media want to tell.
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and its idiotic for the W.H. to call Cuba terrorists

[dipsydoodle]

1. There's mention of this elsewhere somewhere or other

The fact is that there is a world outside of the USA and the rest of the world's news services, who do not have the bias of your Mickey Mouse media, are infact covering such news items.

Broadly speaking anything your media suppresses just makes them look like the nose pickers they are.

[ensho]

2. true

nt

[bemildred]

3. Heroic Cuban doctors working to save Haiti after the earthquake.

That would cause lots of cognitive disconnect here in the USA all right.

[kenny blankenship]

4. Mr. Korb had a very good impulse and instinct - too bad he wasn't in charge

Cuba probably could have done a great deal for Haiti, had they been provided our cooperation and good will. But good will towards Cuba is politically impossible in the US, so tough shit for Haiti.

[Festivito]

5. Cuba has 400 doctors from minute 1, and FOX says Cuba is absent?!

Talk about your Fubar'd Old Xenophobes.

[Mudoria]

6. Seen reports mentioning Cuban assistance in all the major media..

Sounds like someone with an agenda...