FYI
HRH Lee Mentley "The joker says the civilized ones, when the chips are down will eat each other." Dark Knight --- On Fri, 1/15/10, Scott Bidstrup <sc...@bidstrup. com> wrote: From: Scott Bidstrup <sc...@bidstrup. com> Subject: Cuba is Missing - Or Is It? To: Date: Friday, January 15, 2010, 11:01 PM All, Cuba is missing, alright, primarily from the list of nations to which the Fawning Corporate Media in the United States is willing to pay respect. What it is not missing from, is the list of first responder nations to the Haiti emergency. Contrary to what Fox News has reported, it has not only responded by sending medical help, but it was one of the first to do so. Cuba, hit frequently by hurricanes as it is, knows how to deal with emergencies, and is doing so very effectively. It was one of the first to land medical help into the affected area, having sent 30 in addition to the 400 it already had there. And its people have responded - I know, because I can listen (7045 Khz.) to the efforts of the ham radio operators in Cuba, providing emergency communications into the affected area - and doing so with more efficiency and effectiveness than anyone else, including such experienced U.S. groups as the Salvation Army. Scott ==== Cuba is Missing...From US Reports on the International Response to Haiti’s Earthquake Dave Lindorff http://www.smirking chimp.com/ thread/26095 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. 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. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ======= S1000+ ======= --- On Sat, 1/16/10, Lee Mentley <leement...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:--
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