We are used to encountering garbage that is labeled “news,” but sometimes even the hardened troller for information is astonished by the smell. On August 3, the online version of the Guardian newspaper “reported” on the situation in Cuba: “Signs of the damage done to the economy by the embargo put in place by the U.S. in 1961 are not hard to find. Cubans are wearily used to shortages. Essential foods are rationed and in short supply,” etc., etc., through the usual litany of hardships that, strangely, did· not exist when Cuba was being ruthlessly exploited by U.s. capitalism.
The embargo may not be the best political and economic idea, but it did not impoverish Cuba. Communism impoverished Cuba. Nothing else could prevent an island full of energetic people, long the recipient of massive foreign aid, trading freely with all the world except the United States, and favored by nature as a region for agriculture, from being able to feed its own people.
Exactly what was it, however, that impoverished the minds of “journalists”?
