Cuba - Love affair with a dictator

If you ever had any doubts, I certainly don't, that the media is left wing and supports communism, recent media reports about Cuba should end them. Since Castro's latest brush with death the media are fawning all over him. Recently I posted about two BBC reports fawining over the dictator.

Now comes one from Reuters.

"Castro exports medicine instead of revolution" blares the Reuters headline.

HAVANA (Reuters) - For hundreds of thousands of poor people from the Andes to the Himalayas, the legacy of Cuba's ailing communist leader Fidel Castro will be not revolutionary war but eyesight.

For decades, the now ailing Castro, who temporarily handed over power to his brother Raul on Monday, prescribed armed revolution to cure the Third World's ills. But more recently he has preferred to export doctors to treat poor people in the undeveloped world.

The programs have expanded rapidly thanks to financial support from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, leader of the world's eighth-largest oil producer and Castro's main ally.

Which is what this is really all about. But how well is the program working?

Doctors Flee South America Sick Man

Posted 7/14/2006

Latin America: As rumors fly about Fidel Castro's demise, truths about his regime's failures slip out. His vaunted overseas "free" medical program for the poor, once a propaganda coup, is falling apart.

In Bolivia, at least 30 Cuban doctors out of 719 defected to freedom, according to Bolivian media.

In Venezuela, 4,000 Cuban doctors out of 15,000 also fled the country, Union Radio reported.

These Cuban doctors were at the forefront of Castro's last-ditch effort to rejuvenate his communist dictatorship. Castro cooked up the Venezuelan "Barrio Adentro" plan just three years ago with Hugo Chavez to obscure his record of dispatching brutal military mercenaries and guerrillas abroad to seize power and influence.

For Chavez, the new Cuban medical missions worked well as political pork to buy votes in his 2004 Venezuelan recall referendum.

One thing these communist dictator loving media folks fail to ask is, if Cuba and Castro is so great, why do people defect at the first chance they get? Whey did hundreds of thousands of them leave when given the chance? Why do thousands risk shark infested waters every year to leave Castro's paradise?

UPDATE

Perhaps the Reuters reporter should talk to this reporter.
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