Cuba Denounces U.S./European Misinformation Campaign

(Granma Editorial)

(Translated by Prensa Latina)

Cuba denounced the misinformation campaigns orchestrated by the United States with the complicity of its European allies and the interests that control the corporate media, in an editorial published Monday in Granma newspaper.

The most recent campaign is the distortion of the death of the counterrevolutionary Wilfredo Soto Garcia, the editorial said.

With complete shamelessness, they pushed to create a case of pancreatitis into a political killing; a justified police detention of less than three hours for disturbance of the peace, without the least use of force, into a deadly beating; a person with a criminal record, sentenced to two years´ prison, into a political dissident, victim of a long sentence.

The people share in the protest of his family, whose pain is offended, and the outrage of the doctors who are practically being accused of complicity in a homicide.

The lying politicians, the mass media that slandered out of political interest and the journalists who reported an event that did not exist without attempting the slightest confirmation, should not enjoy impunity. At the very least, they should confess their error and apologize to the family whose mourning they did not respect, the editorial said.

All of them are quiet in the face of the one million civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, which they described as “collateral damage,” and in the face of the extrajudicial executions with unmanned planes in sovereign countries, the editorial continued.

They stay prudently silent in response to the use of torture, cover up for the existence of secret U.S. prisons in Europe, and prevent the investigation of crimes committed in Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo naval base, which is usurped from Cuba, and the secret CIA flights with people kidnapped in other states.

They are also unmoved by the brutal way governments in Europe unload on the poorest and on immigrants the consequences of the economic crisis. They look the other way when the unemployed or students are repressed with unusual violence in those opulent societies.

However, they hunt around for pretexts to denigrate Cuba. And when these are lacking, they invent them.

The lawmaker David Rivera, notorious for election corruption and his extremist campaigns to eliminate the right of Cuban emigres to travel to their country, who only a few weeks ago accused President Carter of being a “Cuban agent,” said under oath in the United States Congress that the deceased man “was beaten to death with batons in Vidal Park in Villa Clara last Sunday.”

He did not even bother to verify that even the people with the worst intentions admit that he was in the park, before and after his brief detention, on Thursday, May 5, and not on Sunday, when he had been hospitalized. It is not surprising that Rivera lies, but that he does it so clumsily, the editorial said.

Someone called Salafranca, a euro deputy with the Popular Party of many anti-Cuban and pro-Yankee merits, who says that the reports on secret CIA flights do not contribute additional information and closes his eyes to abstain from any condemnation, asserted in the European Parliament that the person “died after his detention and beating by the Cuban police.”

El Pais, part Spain´s Prisa Group and the confabulations of the PP, published a dispatch under the headline, “Cuban dissident dies after receiving police beating.”

ABC, historically at the service of the worst causes, summed up: “Cuban dissident dies after beating by Castro police.” They are not interested in confirming the veracity of the supposed events, and do not even bother to conceal the conspiracy with different headlines.

Strangely, even President Barack Obama himself, in Miami and in response to a very tendentious question from the Univision network, even though he said details had to be cleared up, also made a statement on the events in Vidal Park that never happened.

It is curious how Obama, always so busy, can retain in his memory the case of a person detained in a Cuban park, to which he was able to return a short while afterward.

However, he has said nothing, and possibly does not even remember the anguished face or the story of the Iraqi girl Samar Hassan, published in the The New York Times on May 7, as she recounted the terrible experience of the murder of her parents by a U.S. patrol as they were returning from the hospital after treating the injuries of her little brother.

In the past, attempts have been made to isolate Cuba or stoke internal disorder to provoke a U.S. intervention. What is the intention of these campaigns? Just to denigrate or something worse? Could it be that those who pull the strings and their internal paid employees would love to invoke “the protection of civilians” to bomb Havana?

The people of Cuba will not let themselves be confused by the internal counterrevolutionaries who are looking for a pretext in the media to promote a conflict with the United States, and they will know how to respond with serenity and determination to the actions of these mercenaries, the editorial concluded.