tangent4ronpaul
01-21-2010, 03:14 PM
I was a bit perplexed by Secretary of State Clinton's reply in a news conference recently, right before she headed down to Haiti for a dog and pony show, when she was asked about Cuba's response to Haiti's disaster? She said that the US was grateful for Cuba opening up their airspace for overflights and would welcome any other help Cuba cared to give.
Given Cuba's history of helping other nations, this seemed "off", so I went searching for the donut holl and found it! The following article does have a bit of an anti-US bias, but does make some good points.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/448
Cuba is Missing...From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti's Earthquake
Fri, 01/15/2010 - 14:01 — dlindorff
In the critical early days following Haiti's 7.0 earthquake, only two mainstream corporate US media outlets reported on Cuba’s response to the tragedy. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its daily print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had almost immediately flown in 30 doctors to the stricken nation.
The Christian Science Monitor, in a second article, quoted Laurence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense and now based at the Center for American Progress, as saying that the US, which is leading the relief efforts in Haiti, should “consider tapping the expertise of neighboring Cuba,” which he noted, “has some of the best doctors in the world--we should see about flying them in.”
As for the rest of the US media, they simply ignored Cuba's role and actions, focusing instead on the US government's plans for aid--plans which were long on talk and short on immediate help.
Left unmentioned was the reality that Cuba already had nearly 350 doctors, emergency technicians and other medical personnel posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and that those medical professionals were the first to respond to the disaster, setting up a hospital right next to the main hospital in Port-au-Prince which collapsed in the earthquake.
Far from “doing nothing” about the disaster as the right-wing propagandists at Fox-TV were charging, Cuba has been one of the most effective and critical responders to the crisis, because it had set up a medical infrastructure before the quake, which was able to mobilize quickly and start treating the victims.
The American emergency response, predictably, has focussed primarily, at least in terms of personnel and money, on sending the hugely costly and inefficient US military--a fleet of aircraft and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier--a factor that should be considered when examining that $100 million figure the Obama administration claims is being allocated to emergency aid to Haiti. Given that the cost of operating an aircraft carrier, including crew, is roughly $2 million a day, just sending a carrier to Port-au-Prince for two weeks accounts for a quarter of the announced American aid effort, and while many of the military personnel sent there will certainly be doing actual aid work, delivering supplies and guarding supplies, many, given America’s long history of brutal military/colonial control of Haiti, will inevitably be spending their time ensuring continued survival and control of the parasitic pro-US political elite in Haiti. (There were even complaints, from groups like Doctors Without Borders, and even the French government, that the US military had given priority to military flights at the Port-au-Prince Airport, blocking actual aid flights from landing during the critical three days when people trapped in rubble needed rescuing before they died of their wounds or of dehydration.)
The reality is that for years, the US has basically ignored the ongoing day-to-day human crisis in Haiti, while Cuba, a poor country itself that continues to struggle under a decades-long US embargo, has been doing the yeoman work of providing basic health care to its neighboring island nation.
The corporate media obligingly and uncritically cover the US aid effort. Meanwhile, with the exception of such alternative outlets as Democracy Now! and the magazine Cuba News, Cuba's contribution is ignored, misreported, or barely mentioned. (One searches in vain through the many pages in the New York Times devoted to the Haitian disaster for any mention of the Cuban doctors or their busy field hospitals in Port-au-Prince.)
Clearly an unapologetically Communist nation coming to the aid of a neighbor in need is simply not a story that the American corporate media want to tell.
Given Cuba's history of helping other nations, this seemed "off", so I went searching for the donut holl and found it! The following article does have a bit of an anti-US bias, but does make some good points.
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/448
Cuba is Missing...From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti's Earthquake
Fri, 01/15/2010 - 14:01 — dlindorff
In the critical early days following Haiti's 7.0 earthquake, only two mainstream corporate US media outlets reported on Cuba’s response to the tragedy. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its daily print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had almost immediately flown in 30 doctors to the stricken nation.
The Christian Science Monitor, in a second article, quoted Laurence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense and now based at the Center for American Progress, as saying that the US, which is leading the relief efforts in Haiti, should “consider tapping the expertise of neighboring Cuba,” which he noted, “has some of the best doctors in the world--we should see about flying them in.”
As for the rest of the US media, they simply ignored Cuba's role and actions, focusing instead on the US government's plans for aid--plans which were long on talk and short on immediate help.
Left unmentioned was the reality that Cuba already had nearly 350 doctors, emergency technicians and other medical personnel posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and that those medical professionals were the first to respond to the disaster, setting up a hospital right next to the main hospital in Port-au-Prince which collapsed in the earthquake.
Far from “doing nothing” about the disaster as the right-wing propagandists at Fox-TV were charging, Cuba has been one of the most effective and critical responders to the crisis, because it had set up a medical infrastructure before the quake, which was able to mobilize quickly and start treating the victims.
The American emergency response, predictably, has focussed primarily, at least in terms of personnel and money, on sending the hugely costly and inefficient US military--a fleet of aircraft and a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier--a factor that should be considered when examining that $100 million figure the Obama administration claims is being allocated to emergency aid to Haiti. Given that the cost of operating an aircraft carrier, including crew, is roughly $2 million a day, just sending a carrier to Port-au-Prince for two weeks accounts for a quarter of the announced American aid effort, and while many of the military personnel sent there will certainly be doing actual aid work, delivering supplies and guarding supplies, many, given America’s long history of brutal military/colonial control of Haiti, will inevitably be spending their time ensuring continued survival and control of the parasitic pro-US political elite in Haiti. (There were even complaints, from groups like Doctors Without Borders, and even the French government, that the US military had given priority to military flights at the Port-au-Prince Airport, blocking actual aid flights from landing during the critical three days when people trapped in rubble needed rescuing before they died of their wounds or of dehydration.)
The reality is that for years, the US has basically ignored the ongoing day-to-day human crisis in Haiti, while Cuba, a poor country itself that continues to struggle under a decades-long US embargo, has been doing the yeoman work of providing basic health care to its neighboring island nation.
The corporate media obligingly and uncritically cover the US aid effort. Meanwhile, with the exception of such alternative outlets as Democracy Now! and the magazine Cuba News, Cuba's contribution is ignored, misreported, or barely mentioned. (One searches in vain through the many pages in the New York Times devoted to the Haitian disaster for any mention of the Cuban doctors or their busy field hospitals in Port-au-Prince.)
Clearly an unapologetically Communist nation coming to the aid of a neighbor in need is simply not a story that the American corporate media want to tell.