NY Times Helps American Students in Cuba Criticize America

NY Times Helps American Students in Cuba Criticize America
According to reporter, medical students say American health care system
too focused on 'bottom line,' U.S. trade 'blockade' frustrating.

By Ken Shepherd
Business & Media Institute
12/8/2006 5:27:09 PM

The limited water, food rations and healthy heapings of Marxist
propaganda are free. The political indoctrination is priceless.

In the December 8 New York Times, reporter Marc Lacey gave readers
a look at American students taking advantage of El Jefe's "full
scholarships to poor students from abroad." But in doing so, Lacey
papered over or ignored criticism of the program as Castro's propaganda
tool, even as he relayed the students' leftist rhetoric against America,
including U.S. health care and trade policies.

"They ask no one to be political – it's your choice," Lacey quoted
student Jamar Williams, before launching into the leftist political
attacks of other American students.

"There is too much of a focus on the bottom line," was the
complaint Lacey heard from the students he talked with about U.S. health
care, saying "most of the Americans here said they had misgivings about
the health care system in their own country."

Others who had chosen to study in Cuba complained about the U.S.
trade embargo. "The blockade, which is what the Cuban government and
many of the American students call it, means no care packages, no visits
from Mom and Dad, and the threat that their government might penalize
them for coming here," Lacey wrote. One student also criticized the U.S.
response to Hurricane Katrina.

Although the Society of Professional Journalists has frequently
criticized the Communist regime for not allowing independent journalists
to exercise their craft free from government interference, Lacey gave
only passing mention to the program's controversial nature. Some
students, he wrote, "cannot help responding" to a "sympathetic portrayal
of Mr. Castro, whom the United States government tars as a dictator who
suppresses his people."

But it's not just Washington diplomats or politicians who take
Castro to task for the medical training program, which Lacey admitted
was "decidedly low-tech." Doctors in other countries have complained
Cuban medics are often farmed out to spread socialist propaganda.

For example, in July 2005, about 400 Venezuelan doctors took to
the streets of Caracas to protest Hugo Chavez's "oil-for-doctors" barter
deal with Cuba in which dictator Fidel Castro sends Cuban-trained
doctors in exchange for Venezuelan oil.

Trauma specialist Pedro Carvallo complained to the BBC that while
"Venezuelan doctors are underpaid" or often go unemployed, the Cuban
physicians were sent primarily as "political agents," not doctors, and
that many of them were not qualified physicians.

The BBC also reported in June 2006 of a similar protest by doctors
in La Paz, Bolivia. Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, is an ally of
Castro and Venezuela's strongman Hugo Chavez.

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2006/20061208172350.aspx