Independent Media?

The media, which are classified as "alternative" and with a hypothetical "independent financing" try to distort the Cuban reality. Annexationists from the first to the last letter written on their pages, misrepresent, lie, manipulate realities. Cuba is one story told by them and a very different one seen by its citizens.

Most of them say they have the truth about what’s going in the country. They are self-proclaimed change-makers in Cuba, those who tell the absolute reality without bias or mediation, therefore the “independent” ring. They boast of covering the informational gaps in the state press.

They criticize, judge, and mock even the people they say they want to save, but are they doing it from these streets? From a factory, a hospital, a school? Well, they aren’t. Many of the founders of these media and some of those who write for them live abroad. It’s difficult to tell the reality of a country, of a people, from so far away.

They are media financed by U.S. organizations for the media bombing on the island, with communication strategies based on the political design that the United States has created to strangle the Cuban sovereignty.

The 2004 Report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba recorded the subversive lines against Cuba, including the promotion of press projects. The State Department, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) finance the “mud machine against Cuba”, supported by the more than 500 million dollars the North American government allocated in the last 20 years for regime change on the island.

For example, El Estornudo, created in Cuba and later legalized in Mexico as an NGO, in order to receive unobstructed funding has recognized that it’s paid by the NED and the Open Society.

So what about independent? Does the saying he who pays is in charge? That's for sure. The autonomy, even of those who say they do it out of principle, is doubtful, since many are already part of the strategy. The United States selects future leaders, trains them, finances, motivates, brings them together, makes them believe they have power, and gives them spaces and platforms. After all, it controls them.

With the advance of computerization in the country and the possibility of greater internet access, the war that is waged against Cuba from these platforms has increased, due to the greater possibility of reaching certain sectors of the population with this type of media manipulation.

They have done it for many years. Counterrevolutionary media are lining up to discredit the Cuban government's administration and delegitimize the social system. They fabricate opinion matrixes aimed at exacerbating discontent related to issues of popular interest, not yet resolved in the country.

Let's not be naive. These and most of the independent media are nothing more than instruments of the United States government in its unconventional war strategy against Cuba.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff