MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY: LOSING A JOB AT THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR WRITING TRUTH ABOUT CUBA!!!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324050304578411030629324960.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond
The glowing reports about Fidel Castro that New York Times NYT -1.48% journalist Herb Matthews wrote from Cuba’s Sierra Maestra have often been used to explain why, in the late 1950s, the U.S. so underestimated the Jesuit-educated megalomaniac who would destroy his own country. More than a half century later, the 1960 National Review cartoon featuring a smiling Castro above a caption that read, “I got my job through the New York Times,” still resonates with exiles.
Now Cuban editor and writer Roberto Zurbano has the opposite problem: He lost his job through the New York Times. To be more precise, Mr. Zurbano, it seems, got fired from his job in Havana because he wrote a March 24 opinion piece for the New York Times that contradicted two of the dictatorship’s most sacred teachings.
Cuban propaganda holds that the revolution elevated the island’s black populations and ended oppression. It also holds that the island is now undergoing reforms that are creating opportunity for everyone. Well, not quite, according to Mr. Zurbano. “Change,” he wrote, “is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality.”
He reminded Times readers that “racial exclusion” has deep roots on the island, adding that “a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.”
The subject, Mr. Zurbano stated, is taboo. “Racism in Cuba has been concealed and reinforced in part because it isn’t talked about. The government hasn’t allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn’t exist. Before 1990, black Cubans suffered a paralysis of economic mobility while, paradoxically, the government decreed the end of racism in speeches and publications. To question the extent of racial progress was tantamount to a counterrevolutionary act. This made it almost impossible to point out the obvious: Racism is alive and well.”
Fast-forward to today and things are even worse, Mr. Zurbano wrote. “In the 21st century, it has become all too apparent that the black population is underrepresented at universities and in spheres of economic and political power, and overrepresented in the underground economy, in the criminal sphere and in marginal neighborhoods.”
Mr. Zurbano has said that his troubles with the regime were caused by a misleading headline used by the Times that he did not approve. But the copy speaks for itself. For a revolution that has morally justified its criminal behavior in part on the grounds that it has created a just society for Afro-Cubans, speaking such things aloud in the international press was a humiliation that could not go unanswered.
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