The Press and Castro's Cuba: Mortal Friends

So what’s the most dangerous nation on earth for journalists? Which nation jails and tortures them at the highest rate?

The question was answered on June 16 by the Committee to Protect Journalists‘ Executive Director, Joel Simon. The setting was a hearing on “Press Freedom in the Americas,” held by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. And quite interestingly, none of that very hemispheric press has yet seen fit to report this item.

So let’s ask the multiple Peabody and Emmy award winning American journalist Dan Rather if he knows who jails and tortures the most journalists on earth.

Fidel Castro is Cuba’s Elvis!

Nope. Seems that Dan’s no help. Okay, now let’s ask the same question to Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism- winner, Andrea Mitchell:

Fidel Castro is old-fashioned, courtly–even paternal, a thoroughly fascinating figure!

Nope. Seems that Ms Mitchell is also in the dark. Let’s go over to multiple Emmy-winning journalist Barbara Walters.

Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful, his presence is commanding.

Looks like we draw another blank. Over to Peabody Award winner Diane Sawyer now–but on the way we trip over this item:

Diane Sawyer was so overcome in Fidel Castro’s presence (during a dinner party at Mort Zuckerman’s Manhattan pad) that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.

So lets’ skip her and try eminent Newsweek and Los Angeles Times journalist, Eleanor Clift.

To be a poor child in Cuba might be better than being a poor child in Miami.

Whoops. Another bum steer with Ms Clift, it appears.

OK, enough with the “fun.” (All quotes above are fully documented, by the way.)

In case you hadn’t guessed Castro’s fiefdom wins the price “for most journalists jailed (by far!) per capita on earth. In fact, in total numbers jailed, Cuba (a nation of 11 million subjects) is only slightly behind China (a nation of 1.4 BILLION!)

According to the Paris-based “Reporters Without Borders,” Cuba today holds 20 percent of the world’s jailed journalists. Imagine Castroite repression with China’s population! Cuban “Law 88,” passed in February 1999, cranked up the repression several notches, mandating up to 20 years in prison for “providing information that could be useful to U.S. policy.”

Imagine a similar law in the U.S. that jailed reporters for “providing information useful to, say, Al-Qaida or Taliban policy.” Today, Cuba–a nation that in 1958 had more TVs, telephones and newspapers per-capita than any continental European country–has one newspaper and fewer internet connections than Uganda, the lowest number in the hemisphere.

As fate would have it, in a gesture hailed by the worldwide media as an exemplar of magnanimity, a journalist whom Castro arrested in 2003 and sentenced to 25 years in his torture chambers for the crime of “disobedience” (he wrote article hailing the U.N. declaration on Human Rights) was released just this week.

These pictures compare his (Ariel Sigler) condition upon arrest in 2003 to those upon release last week. Now imagine the international media uproar (!!!) if something remotely similar could be shown regarding those other prisoners in Cuba (Guantanamo)!!!

Now see if you can find this heroic man’s (Ariel Sigler’s) pictures anywhere in the MSM?