| Old Articles | | Friday, February 08 | | · | |
| Wednesday, February 06 | | · | |
| Tuesday, February 05 | | · | Savage Capitalism or Socialism: A Conversation with Luis Britto Garcia |
| Sunday, February 03 | | · | Canada vs. Venezuela: The Background Gets Even Murkier |
| Thursday, January 31 | | · | |
| Monday, January 28 | | · | The History - and Hypocrisy - of US Meddling in Venezuela |
| · | Canada Is Complicit in Venezuela's US-Backed Coup D'état |
| Wednesday, September 26 | | · | Why Israel Demolishes: Khan Al-Ahmar as Representation of Greater Genocide |
| Friday, September 21 | | · | US Disregard for International Law Is a Menace to Latin America |
| Saturday, August 25 | | · | How Long is the Shelf-Life of Damnable Racist Capitalist Lies? |
| Thursday, August 09 | | · | Martial Law By Other Means: Corporate Strangulation of Dissent |
| Wednesday, August 08 | | · | North Korea and The Washington Trap |
| · | Venezuela Assassination Attempt: Maduro Survives but Journalism Doesn't |
| Sunday, May 20 | | · | The British Royal Wedding, Feelgoodism and the Colonial Jumbie |
| Friday, May 04 | | · | |
| Monday, April 09 | | · | The Bayer-Monsanto Merger Is Bad News for the Planet |
| Tuesday, March 20 | | · | Finally, Some Good News |
| Thursday, March 15 | | · | Zimbabwe Open for Business, Code for International Finance Capitalism |
| Friday, January 12 | | · | Shadow Armies: The Unseen, But Real US War In Africa |
| Wednesday, December 13 | | · | The U.S. is Not a Democracy, It Never Was |
Older Articles
| |
 | |
Caribbean:
Posted on Friday, January 15 @ 12:46:11 UTC
Topic: Haiti
|
 Cuba is Missing... From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti’s Earthquake
By Dave Lindorff
January 15, 2010 - thiscantbehappening.net
There are only two US media outlets that have reported on Cuba’s response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. 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 print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 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 have simply ignored Cuba's role and actions.
In fact, left unmentioned is the reality that Cuba already had over 400 doctors posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and that those doctors 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 claiming, 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 an 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. Considering 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.
Otherwise, the US has basically ignored the ongoing day-to-day human crisis in Haiti, while Cuba has been doing the yeoman work of providing basic health care.
But that’s not a story that the American corporate media want to tell.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. Author of “Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For-Profit Hospital Chains”, his latest book is “The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office”. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Source: thiscantbehappening.net
|
|
| |
| Article Rating | Average Score: 4.57
Votes: 14
| |
|
|
