U.S. Media Images of Post-revolutionary Cuba
Shaped by Government Policy and Commercial Grammar
by Saul Landau

source: http://lap.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/33/5/118

For 47-plus years the U.S. mass media have consistently misunderstood the essence of the Cuban revolution. Tens of thousands of daily news stories, editorial analyses, and "in-depth" reports have focused on Cuba's communist, totalitarian government's human rights violations, the failure of its economy, and the persistence in power of its evil but fascinating dictator-leader. Few have tried to understand or explain why it has survived the unrelenting hostility of its powerful northern neighbor.

After the Soviet collapse in the early 1990s, pundits and political reporters began taking virtual office-pool bets on the exact date of Castro's demise. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andres Oppenheimer's Castro's Final Hour (1992) broadened the meaning of the words "final" and "hour."

Over four decades, the media have, like parrots, repeated U.S. government pretexts for anti-Cuban policies, which center on "punishing" Castro for his misdeeds. Uninformed readers could well conclude that only one person lived on that island just south of the Florida Keys or that Castro had won his place in the Guinness Book of World Records for length of disobedience to the United States.

The narrowness and skewing of reporting will hardly surprise scholars or close observers of contemporary Cuba, nor will it come as a shock to the few journalists who have penetrated the veneer of stupid questions with which most U.S. reporters arm themselves before traveling to the island to shoot their assignment. I recall several reporters' asking me in the early 1960s whether Fidel had really belonged to the Communist party before he declared himself a "Marxist-Leninist" in early 1961 or whether he had cut a secret deal with the Soviets long before he marched triumphantly into Havana in January 1959. Other reporters wanted to know why Cuba didn't abide by U.S. cultural norms regarding free press, free speech, and free political parties. Not only did they know little of Cuban history but they shared without questioning the assumption that U.S. standards should prevail for political behavior everywhere. None asked when in Cuban history the island's citizens had enjoyed U.S.-style free speech, press, and politics. Few of the reporters I met in the 1960s or thereafter knew anything beyond a bare sketch of Cuban history. Journalists such as Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, Lee Lockwood, who published several articles in Life, I. F. Stone, who published I. F. Stone's Weekly, and scholars such as Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, whose Cuba reporting in Monthly Review shone in 1960-1961, constituted rare exceptions.

By early 1960 Huberman and Sweezy had recognized that the Cuban revolution had turned irreversibly in a socialist direction. This meant that the economic and social system would quickly change from one based on private to one based on public ownership of productive property. Immediately after the revolutionary triumph, Castro had allowed certain journalists to spend quality time with him. Lockwood, the best of these, presented readers with objective, critical, but sympathetic portraits of a struggling revolutionary leader coping with the immense problems of underdevelopment while simultaneously warding off the aggressive neighbor from the North. Laura Berguist of Look also ran sympathetic features, as did Georgie Anne Geyer of the Chicago Sun Times until she morphed into a supreme Castrophobe. (Was it the familiar feeling of "betrayal" that Theodore Draper [1962; 1965] popularized, arguing that Castro had deceived many people by charming them, by making them think that behind his iron, revolutionary will stood a sentimental liberal, Western intellectual?) Most reporters and scholars, in their pursuit of evil, weaknesses, and logical contradictions in Castro's persona and discourse, have generally ignored the levels of revolutionary, antiliberal consensus within the Cuban leadership.

Part of the failure of U.S. journalists to report accurately, much less insightfully, is rooted in their ignorance. Another source of the problem -- even for the few resourceful and informed journalists -- has been the inaccessibility of most of Cuba's leaders. Indeed, when I filmed documentaries with Fidel in 1968, 1974, and 1987-1988, I found few revolutionary leaders willing to grant me an interview, although I had off-the-record discussions with several of them. Further, from my conversations with generals and Politburo members I gleaned little insight into the inner workings of Cuban political decision making. I did learn about the strong ties that held together the brother-and-sisterhood of revolutionaries and their common faith in Fidel. This derived from a commitment to him as a leader who they believed would do whatever was necessary to persevere without violating basic principles the ethical credo that revolved around sovereignty and social justice. Most of the journalists who "drop in" to do quick reports on Cuba have never talked to any of the top leaders. They exchange formalities with Foreign Relations Ministry bureaucrats, but when they speak about hard-liners they have little notion of what this means.

How many reporters have developed relations of confidence with any of the hundreds of thousands of members of the loyal fraternity throughout the island who actually mean "patria o muerte" when they shout the slogan at rallies? Even in the 1960s, aside from Matthews and Lockwood, few U.S. journalists penetrated far enough into the revolutionary culture to know how to pose an interesting question. Most began with the idea that the revolution had failed, without defining the term beyond reference to rationing of food or the absence of U.S.-style freedoms. Mass-media reporters still don't consider in their question formulation the significance of the original goals the revolutionaries had set and therefore don't comprehend Cuban revolutionary leaders' seeming obsession with national independence and social justice.

Instead, they maintain a focus on some results of class conflict involving violations of human rights and, until 1991, ties to Soviet communism. Even Matthews, who knew and was trusted by Fidel, couldn't quite grasp the essence of this Caribbean phenomenon, which constituted part of a worldwide revolution against colonialism and imperialism. His New York Times stories from the Sierra Maestra in 1957 promoted Fidel and the revolution as solid democrats. "Castro has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the constitution, to hold elections," he wrote (New York Times, February 26, 1957). These words would later haunt him when anti-Castro forces insisted that Fidel had duped him and that the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra had always been closet or (in Che Guevara's case) open reds.

In 1957-1958, while the underground struggle and guerrilla war had begun to erode Batista's power, Matthews' Times series about Batista's corruption and brutality and the nobility of the revolutionary cause won support for the rebels among Times readers. Later, Bob Taber did a CBS TV report that supported Matthews's assessment. Taber subsequently organized and headed the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. (Castro had a way of luring people -- even journalists -- into the cause; Matthews, even in his seventies, retained a strong attachment to Fidel.) Matthews' and Taber's reports did not lie. Most of the revolutionaries in the underground network or in the mountains did hold the values that Matthews reported. But these values remained peripheral to their core goals. Castro, his brother Raul, Camilo Cienfuegos, Che Guevara, and other guerrillas possessed more profoundly Cuban reasons for risking their lives than bringing some form of U.S.-style democracy to Cuba.

Matthews noted this, of course, but his newspaper reports did not develop the complex and deeply historical theme of Cuban independence. The barbudos and their underground comrades in the cities had made a life-or-death commitment to realize the ideal of Cuban independence set forth in the 1890s war for that cause. They also assumed that national sovereignty entailed a partnership with social justice, a commitment that would later carry most of them onto whatever path would best bring about those aspirations. The United States, predictably, reacted negatively to early reforms. Fidel responded by moving to the left, using U.S. reaction as a platform to deepen revolutionary and anti-imperial consciousness. As the United States administered economic punishment in Cuba's first revolutionary year, the Soviet Union offered rewards. By late 1959, Fidel and the guerrillas in power had removed most of those who drew the line at relationships with communism and opened the way for what became an intimate relationship with the Soviet Union.

Matthews began to despair. I talked with him in his Times office shortly before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs assault. He shook his head over "Fidel getting into bed with the Russians." (By this time the Times publisher had kicked Matthews upstairs into an "editorial" position.) We both knew that a CIA-backed attack was coming. Weeks before the invasion, Times reporter Tad Szulc had written a front-page piece with details. The newspaper excised key facts such as the exact day and place of the landing because the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, after experience and consulting with President John F. Kennedy as to whether to include them, followed White House dictates. Kennedy preferred that the paper exclude such data on national-security grounds. (Kennedy later regretted his action. "If the Times had published the date and place we might have called off the invasion and I would have been spared a humiliating experience," he reportedly told Sulzberger [Gore Vidal, personal communication, 2002, reporting on a conversation with Kennedy]). In late 1959 and early 1960, Matthews had pleaded with Fidel to reject Soviet aid, but when I asked him what would replace it [with] he shrugged his shoulders: "I guess he had to do what he did." The aging journalist in his stories and editorials had tried to persuade the U.S. government to respond prudently to the revolution, to keep Cuba in "our sphere."

But neither his stories nor the remotely sympathetic reporting in a few other outlets placed the Cuban revolution in a clear context. The public didn't understand that Cuba's revolution did not emerge from a vacuum or from Soviet plotting. After all, Algeria burned with rebellion, and Vietnam and Kenya had guerrilla movements, as did several other nations in what became known as the "Third World." Cuba's revolution shared with many others the characteristics of a national liberation movement. In the post-World War II period, African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries rose up against their colonial masters, and a pattern of discourse grew to inform large publics to act against the old imperial order. Revolutionary nationalism meant that new nations would not only emerge but find their proper place in history. Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, the Congo, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Vietnam, India, China, and other countries shared certain antiimperial characteristics. Most of the media, however, made little or no connection between these nationalist processes.

Instead, editorials and feature stories continued to pose outdated and ethnocentric questions, as if Third World revolutions would naturally adopt U.S. standards. In February and March 1959 the U.S. media focused on Fidel's holding "kangaroo courts" for the Batista police and military figures who had tortured and murdered as many as 20,000. The very press that had underplayed or entirely ignored Batista's repression and paid scant attention to the control exercised by the Mafia over Havana's clubs and hotels now became an adamant defender of "Cuban democracy" and a critic of Fidel for not holding U.S.-style elections.

Similarly, the media that had rarely mentioned press censorship throughout most of Latin America and, for that matter, during Batista's reign in Cuba became fixated on Castro's attempt to shape a press that would bring the populace a revolutionary message and not "distract" them with massive advertising alongside pious pleas for some abstract freedom. During the June-October 1960 period when I first visited Cuba, U.S. reporters repeatedly asked me why Fidel insisted on mobilizing so many people for demonstrations. "He has a message for them," I answered, "and they seem to want to hear it."

Simmering underneath the critical stories about Fidel's restricting freedom of the press was a more basic issue: restricting property. When the Cuban government issued its urban reform laws during the first month of rule and the agrarian reform law in May 1959, U.S. government apprehension increased dramatically. Shooting former U.S. allies (Batista police and military) and restricting the press and political parties offended Washington, but when Fidel touched U.S. property he crossed the line between naughty and seriously disobedient. In 1953 the CIA had responded to Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh's plans to nationalize U.S. oil interests by overthrowing him. In 1954 it had ousted President Jacobo Arbenz from power in Guatemala as he prepared to expropriate part of the United Fruit Company's holdings. Fidel, along with all other conscious Latin Americans, took serious note of these events. Che Guevara, an eyewitness to the Guatemala operation, had learned well the importance of resisting U.S. aggression.

Since Fidel in power did not behave like a liberal U.S. reformer talking about cleaning up corruption and helping the poor but not accomplishing these difficult tasks the media considered him a suspicious character. To redistribute wealth and clean up corruption required the will to destroy the old order, and these tasks did not coincide with devotion to U.S.-style civil liberties and property rights.

Early media supporters of the revolution such as Ruby Hart Phillips of the New York Times and Jules DuBois of the Chicago Tribune turned anti-Castro as the revolution turned against private property and toward the Soviet Union. The cold war defined the politics of the time, and even knowledgeable observers like Phillips and DuBois possessed an unquestioning hatred of anything that smacked of communism. They didn't understand that Cuban communism developed as a direct result of U.S. hostility, not from a Soviet plan, and that the Cuban revolution remained part and parcel of a larger anti-imperial, anticolonial movement. To this day, the ethnocentric ress corps does not place Cuba's revolution in the context of its own and world history, nor do most reporters see the revolutionaries themselves as members of a historical fraternity forged in a common commitment dating back to at least 1868.

In this sense, the media is unconscious of its own reporting history. By 1960 the stories filed with U.S. newspapers had turned from positive (in early 1959) to overwhelmingly negative. A typical story focused on Castro's embrace of Soviet communism and his "betrayal" of the revolution's ideals. These reports coincided with US government policy. In the late spring of 1960, President Dwight Eisenhower gave formal assent to what had already begun informally: a CIA covert operation to overthrow the Cuban government and replace it with a pro-United States regime. The media promoted the betrayal theme, which also emerged as the leitmotif for the most important anti-Castro books of the period.

In Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realties (1962) and Castroism: Theory and Practice (1965), Theodore Draper made the argument that Fidel had promised a liberal middle-class revolution, replete with U.S.-style civil liberties and of course social justice, and had sold out those ideals to totalitarian communism. Draper, a brilliant historian and principled critic, compared some of Castro's promises to hold free elections, have a free press, and maintain a U.S.-style civil-liberties regime with what the revolutionary government actually did: eschew elections (which Castro would have won hands-down), ban the antirevolutionary press, and institute heavy control over procedural liberties. Draper's facts were accurate, but he missed the point. Castro's repressive moves had come about as a result of predictable U.S. counterrevolutionary policies, and the very debate itself overlooked the essence of the revolutionary process.

I can attest to the preparation of at least one reporter who covered Cuba for the nightly CBS news show and in a CBS documentary. In October 1974 I accompanied Dan Rather to report on Cuba and interview Fidel Castro. I read on the expensive leather binder he carried "Cuba Briefing Book for Mr. Rather." I expected to find inside the folder an in-depth analysis of Cuban economic and political issues. Instead, Rather showed me two clippings from Time and one from Newsweek. All made the same point, which Rather then broadcast as "news" from Havana: Castro had made great strides in education and health care, but Soviet-dominated Cuba had no free press, speech, or politics.

After all these years, reporters still fail to grasp the fact that several hundred thousand Cubans made a revolution to win independence and social justice, goals that Jose Marti had set forth in 1895. Indeed, contemporary reports on Cuba still contain no reference to the importance of those Cubans over age 60 now who still belong to this informal and unnamed society of the historically committed. This revolutionary alliance that began in the 1950s has largely escaped not only media attention but also that of the academic community. Without comprehending the commitment that these Cubans made in the 1950s, it is impossible to cope intellectually with the Cuban revolutionary project.

Another historical issue largely ignored by journalists and many academics relates to Cuba's choice to guarantee its revolutionary survival. By 1959, how many powerful nations backed revolutionary projects? The Soviet Union served as the unique insurance company for revolutions, but it provided full coverage to very few of them. Similarly, Marxism-Leninism served as both theory and ideology, a base of ethics and ideals for revolutionary goals. How many viable revolutionary discourses existed that allowed for the expression of anti-imperial and redistributive sentiments and laid down the guidelines for maintaining state power? Did Draper and other liberals expect that Castro would espouse some revised form of Jeffersonianism to hold sway over Cubans while the nation of Jefferson disavowed that Founding Father's principles in its actions toward Cuba? For Castro to have made a priority the protection of his enemies' U.S.-style civil liberties in the face of armed attacks by the United States he would have had to have lost his political senses.

From the outset of revolutionary power, Washington welcomed Cuban killers and torturers, thieves and brigands. They came to Florida and soon had U.S. permission to use U.S. bases to attack Cuba. The former revolutionary air force chief Pedro Diaz Lanz defected, went to Florida, and got a green light to overfly the island. He took off from U.S. bases and dropped counterrevolutionary leaflets on Cuba. From the summer of 1959 on, countless acts of violence hatched in Florida took their toll on Cuban life and property. The United States became known to the warriors in power in Havana as 'the enemy." Yet U.S. reporters somehow expected Castro and his cohorts to uphold the most liberal of U.S. values while the United States violated its own laws in its behavior toward Cuba. In response to U.S. demands, Castro proved then and now his penchant for disobedience, a trait never tolerated in Third World leaders by the U.S. elite. Indeed, one would have to scour the history books to discover any Latin American leader who defied U.S. power and remained as head of state for any length of time. Instead of recognizing the obvious fact that the United States intervenes in the internal affairs of less powerful countries when it chooses, the media uncritically take their lead from the White House. Congress also has used a "national security" pretext to pass laws necessary for nine presidents to maintain embargoes and travel bans against Cuba.

During the early 198Os, Ronald Reagan's lust to privatize led him essentially to hand over Cuba policy to an extreme-right-wing lobby headed by Jorge Mas Canosa and his Cuban American National Foundation. [Note from Karen: This of course overlooks the fact that CANF was created as a direct response to the suggestion made in the Republican Party think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, as presented in the Santa Fe Report, to do exactly that: create a Cuban-American lobbying group that would justify Washington's policies. It simply gave the US corporations and power-brokers the "justification" for doing what they wanted to do all along -- annex Cuba, at least economically, and make it seem like they were doing it on behalf of some Cubans, albeit Cubans who had left the country. ] This private interest group not only made Cuba policy but also orchestrated and oriented the media in their reporting on Cuba. While publishing hostile stories about Cuba, the press barely covered this transfer of U.S. public policy to private hands. Thus the typical news story would continue to admit reluctantly that Castro had improved health and education and immediately "balance" these accomplishments by pointing out that Cubans had no free press or procedural rights. Castro became a "dictator," a "Soviet puppet" or a 44communist tyrant." Such expressions, of course, vitiated any serious reporting on events occurring on the island.

In 1990, POV accepted my 1988 documentary The Uncompromising Revolution but refused to air it without "balancing" it with the point of view contained in a film by Nestor Almendros (Nobody Listened), which depicted Cuba as a torture chamber. POV executives told me that my film had too strong a point of view for POV to air without an opposing one. In the film I tried to lay out the context for the revolution and the possible choices that lay ahead in post-Castro Cuba: democratize by trusting the younger generations or maintain rule by bureaucracy. I did not predict the rapid demise of Soviet power. In the post-Soviet period, however, I saw no reason to expect Fidel and his fraternity to change the context of their revolution as they searched for viable formulas to maintain state power with some semblance of principles. As some predicted demise or rapid conversion to capitalism or some form of social democracy, I predicted that Fidel's decisions would remain political, not economic. He could not avoid painful decisions such as "dollarization," but he retained a focus on maintaining political control rather than ceding power to economists in their frenzy to find formulas to keep Cuba's sliding economy afloat.

By the late 1980s one already found some members of the media in downright giddy expectation that Fidel would fall along with the Soviet Union. In fact, they deceived themselves as well as their readers. Just as Draper had shaped a generation of liberal critics by focusing on the gap between Castro's early liberal-sounding pronouncements (some of which were surely meant to mollify potentially critical opinion in the United States) and his later tough and anti-civil-liberties positions, Tad Szulc picked up a similar stick in his 1986 Fidel: A Critical Portrait. Szulc depicted Castro as a manipulator who had sucked civil libertarians into the 26th of July Movement only to betray their faith when he achieved power.

In 1989 at the Smithsonian Institution after returning from China glowing about the Chinese model, Szulc described the revolution as an "aberration" in Cuban history. Stunned, I asked him how he would define "revolution" other than as an aberration. Wasn't that, I asked, the meaning of the word? Taken aback, he replied that the Cuban economy couldn't work and that Cubans should apply the Chinese method. "If Fidel was conniving," I continued, "how would you classify the Chinese leaders whom you seem to adore?" He didn't answer my question. Szulc, a Polish anticommunist to the core, became a fan of the Chinese model because it abandoned socialism in practice while retaining its ideology as flimsy pretense at continuity -- perestroika without glasnost, to use the Soviet terminology. But Castro, the Jesuit-cum-Marxist, maintained control over both economic and political policies. The media portrayal of the man has obscured his role as builder of political consensus.

Most reporters don't write about or even inquire into the nature of debates going on behind the closed doors of the Central Committee or the almost hermetically sealed portals of the Politburo. Reporters and scholars alike refer to hard-liners and soft-liners, tending to put those who speak in civilian rhetoric rather than military or Marxist-Leninist formulations, such as Vice Presidents Ricardo Alarcon and Carlos Lage, in the soft camp and the generals and old Communist party members in the hard-line position. But most of the reporters have no idea how any of the people line up on the issues of foreign and economic policy. None of the high-ranking members of the revolutionary fraternity have yet revealed their secrets to outsiders. Men like Carlos Franqui, who edited Revolucion in the early years and defected in the late 1960s, became bitter. The acidity in his writings erodes his insights. Similarly, the novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante (died in 2005) and the cinematographer Nestor Almendros (died in the 1990s) defused their genuine criticism with vitriol. Alcibiades Hidalgo, who defected a decade ago, writes for the discredited Nuevo Herald and reveals little of the actual process of Cuban politics. These, along with most critics, assume that the revolution has failed.

I would suggest that young reporters look at the Cuban revolution as a success in the past tense, since I don't know what to call it or any other Third World society today. Under Castro's guidance (in a 1957 letter to her father Celia Sanchez called him "our caudillo," referring to what the movement needed [Sweig, 2002]), Cuba was transformed from an informal U.S. colony into a proud history-making nation. Cubans altered the history of Latin America and southern Africa with their actions in Angola. The revolution continues to provide its people with relatively high levels of health care and education a rare occurrence in today's Third World.

Cubans also stand out as unique in Latin America because they possess substantive rights. For all their problems, and they are multiple, they are the only people who feel secure in their access to free health care and education, not to a free press, free speech as we know it, or political freedom. Perhaps some of the scholars who have penetrated the political culture of the island can someday help educate the honest journalists who actually want to understand one of the great phenomena of our time.

REFERENCES
Draper, Theodore
1962 Castro's Revolution. Myths and Realities. New York Preger.
1965 Castroism: Theory and Practice. New York: Praeger.
1992 Oppenheimer, Andres Castro's Final Hour. New York: Simon and Schuster.
1986 Szulc, Tad 1986 Fidel: A Critical Portrait. New York: Morrow.
2002 Sweig, Julia 2002 Inside the Cuban Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.