Miguel Iturria Savón, Translator: Unstated
Tuesday 9 May, on listening to the reading, on the National Television
News, of the official daily press note from Granma, the official organ
of the Communist Party of Cuba, I remembered the old joke about
Napoleon, Granma and the Battle of Waterloo: "If Napoleon had had a
newspaper like Granma nobody would know, yet, of his defeat at Waterloo. "
The praise has a Spanish-Creole version: "If the Spanish monarchy had
had to rely on reports from Granma, the world still wouldn't know who
lost, in 1898, the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines."
The evocation of the joke about the usual disinformation of the partisan
scrap of paper comes to mind because in the press note above, as serious
as the pompous voice of the announcer, the paper reports on the police
who caused the death of the peaceful opponent Wilfredo Soto Juan Garcia,
who received a beating on Thursday May 5 at Vidal Park in Santa Clara,
from where he was taken to the police station and from there to the
provincial hospital, where he died three days later.
The free-form and biased version from Granma doesn't limit itself to
masking the death of former political prisoner and member of the Central
Opposition Coalition; as if that were not enough it goes on to talk of
alleged criminal record of the decedent's and blames his death on his
health problems, which did have but which were compounded by the
caresses of the military.
Granma's press note would not have been written if the incident had no
significance in and out of the island. The night before, the Spanish
reporter Mauricio Vicent published in El Pais (Spain): "Death of a
dissident after being beaten up by the police." The Spanish writer cites
the twitter of Yoani Sanchez, who warned that "this police brutality is
not an isolated case."
The network of bloggers and independent journalists such as Guillermo
Fariñas, Martha Beatriz Roque and others, knew the agony of Soto Garcia,
whose crime was to refuse to leave the park in their city, located 280
km from Havana.
Clothes make the man. Granma distorts what happened instead of
denouncing it and demanding criminal responsibility for those
responsible for the death of a sick citizen, kicked in the public
street. In February and March 2010, Granma and Cuban National Television
News denigrated Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died in prison after a
prolonged hunger strike to demand an end to the beatings in prison. They
also slandered the journalist Guillermo Fariñas Hernandez for declaring
a hunger strike to demand the release of ailing political prisoners.
Granma reporters, like Napoleon, who sent Paris fictitious reports from
the battlefields, and like the colonial government in Cuba, who
embellished the reports to Madrid and described supporters of
independence as "rascals, lowlifes and highwaymen," entangled themselves
in a lie rather than conform to the truth.
May 15 2011
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