Imagine a major story in one of America’s top newspapers on an island in San Francisco Bay named Alcatraz.
Now imagine that this story omits mentioning a prison.
What could conceivably account for such an “oversight?” Might the writer have an agenda? Might a “full-disclosure” of the writers’ background and family connections reveal such an agenda?
For tens of thousands of Americans an equivalent story was published in the Washington Post last week by its chief Latin American reporter Nick Miroff. The “in-depth” article featured an islet of the southwestern coast of Cuba called the Isle of Pines, which hosted the biggest prison/torture and forced-labor complex for political prisoners in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Tens of thousands of American citizens of Cuban heritage had family members tortured there by Castro’s Stalinist regime. Some had their family members murdered there. Dozens of the surviving torture victims are U.S. citizens and live in the U.S. today. These heroes qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s (8 years). Several of these prisoners are black Cubans who suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (27 years).