U.S. political prisoners and the media; the truth emerges

By SALVADOR CAPOTE*

“In those 194 days, El Nuevo Herald published 806 articles, and The Miami Herald 305 – a total of 1,111 items, which could adversely impact the judicial process, an average of more than five per day, without a single objective article included.”

CTV’s ‘W5’ joins anti-Cuba diatribe

By ISAAC SANEY, National Spokesperson, Canadian Network On Cuba

THE Canadian Network on Cuba informs you that in addition to the Toronto Star’s malicious disinformation campaign on Cuba in conjunction with the Miami Herald’s Spanish edition, CTV’s “W-5” has also joined the scurrilous campaign of outright deception based on bogus sources. A lead item presented by Victor Malarek on the program “W-5” on Saturday March 16, presented Cuba as a “paradise for sex tourists,” a veritable smorgasbord for paedophiles. The “big exposé” itself was a collaborative effort involving the Canadian Border Services Agency, The Toronto Star, and even Juan O. Tamayo, a CIA asset touted as a reporter with The Miami Herald. Neither the Miami Herald nor its reporter Tamayo are credible sources when it comes to Cuba. It is known that for decades the Herald has been a U.S.-backed mouthpiece for the Cuban counter-revolutionary mafia based in south Florida. As for Tamayo, he was “outed” as a CIA asset years ago by veteran Quebec journalist Jean-Guy Allard.

Condemn Toronto Star’s scandalous scare-mongering on Cuba

THE Toronto Star and El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language sister publication of the Miami Herald, have conspired to publish a sensationalist series on “sex tourism” to Cuba. The series began precisely one month to the day following the “visit” by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird to Cuba on February 15, 2013 and his provocative meeting with “dissidents”. “He pledged Canada’s support for efforts to secure freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law,” his department said at the time in a release, “in the only remaining Communist country in the Western hemisphere.”

Now the “dissidents” have emerged, writes ANDREW BRETT*, to form the main “source” for the Toronto-Miami media disinformation blaming the Cuban people and government, who are the victims, for “sex tourism.” Far from being a coincidence, the series serves the agenda of the Harper government of political destabilization and isolation of all opposition to imperialist dictate in the Americas. 

The Star also writes: “Although Canada has had a law against abusing children abroad since 1997, it is undermined by the inability of law enforcement officials to monitor sexual offenders as they slip out of the country.” Thus, under the banner of high ideals, it furnishes the Harper Government the pretext to collect information on all those Canadians travelling to the independent Socialist Republic of Cuba. – Tony Seed

Toronto Star makes up facts in exposé of sex tourism in Cuba

“THERE is truly no prostitution healthier than Cuba’s,” said Fidel Castro in 1992. Or so claims the Toronto Star. But did he really?

Not at all. Castro actually said, “There is truly no tourism healthier than Cuba’s.”

This just scratches the surface of the fact-free reporting of the Star in its new series The Ugly Canadians, an exposé of a supposed epidemic of Canadians travelling to Cuba for child sex tourism.

Reporters Without Borders unmasked: Its well-financed private arrangement with Otto Reich to destroy Cuba’s economy

By DIANA BARAHONA*, Council on Hemispheric Affairs

• Robert Ménard, founder of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), is out to bring down Castro rather than protect journalists.
• Tens of thousands of U.S. taxpayer dollars go to finance an organization that critically misuses its calculated similarity to the name of a highly regarded group, Doctors without Borders (MSF).
• Rather than a bona fide NGO, RSF is an extremist anti-Castro shock brigade.
• Ménard is a propagandist extraordinaire and committed zealot on taxpayer funds.
• Saatchi and Saatchi teams up with Bacardi in an attempt to trash the Cuba tourist industry.
• Vivendi Universal provides hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of in-kind resources to Ménard.
• Concern about journalists is an afterthought.

Freedom of the press, US style: Who killed Gary Webb?

The journalist who exposed the crimes of Luis Posada Carriles | JEAN-GUY ALLARD*

HAVANA (January 5) – Like few journalists before him, Gary Webb exposed the CIA’s evil schemes in the drug world and revealed to the US public how the country’s African-American neighbourhoods were inundated with crack as part of drug trafficking designed to supply the Nicaraguan Contras with money and weapons.