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The Ever Lower Standards of El País

CUBA, April 13, 2010. - It is no secret that the Spanish media group Prisa, owners of the newspaper El Pais, which had earlier boasted of its leftist leanings, but has for a long time now being behaving along the lines of what the French call gauche caviar, is an instruments used by U.S.—and the subservient Spanish Right—in their efforts to discredit Cuban society.

The concerts Saturday at the Jose Marti Anti-Imperialist Square in Havana and the esplanade in front of the former Moncada Barracks were difficult to deal with for the editors of Prisa. It tasted bitter for them. So what they wrote in the daily El Pais about these two events was riddled with the usual platitudes.

For El Pais, the artists and intellectuals who in Cuba freely expressed how they felt on Saturday were "the government of General Raúl Castro [who had] decided to organize two simultaneous concerts."

In their account of these concerts, they note that Silvio Rodriguez, who had "been announced by the official media as the artist who would open the concert in Havana," had come on stage "to read a text of his that had already appeared online, but he did not sing." One doesn’t need to be too smart to realize that they are trying to downplay the great singer-songwriter’s participation.

Not a single line was written about the thousands who attended the concerts, or about the views expressed by the artists and intellectuals, upholders of an array of aesthetic trends and creeds. To prop up the on-going media campaign against Cuba, what they found newsworthy were the arrogant and false statements by the U.S. Secretary of State at a university in Kentucky—Hillary Clinton commending those who "have now started criticizing Cuba because they let people die"—and the empty comments by one Michael Reid, who wrote in The Economist (UK) that "the Castro brothers" had failed to put in place "a strategy to ensure the survival of their regime when they no longer exist."

In another article, by Mexican analyst Diego Petersen Farah, the Spanish daily El Pais says that "what is important today is not the truth behind the events but their capacity to surprise us more often, in less time." Doesn’t that describe well how El Pais behaves these days in an outrageous anti-Cuban campaign that regularly distorts our reality? (Cubaminrex – Granma Daily)

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