Cuban regime’s deluded mouthpiece equates peaceful protests with storming U.S. Capitol | Opinion

He speaks decent English, but the Cuban regime’s mouthpiece to U.S. audiences can’t tell the difference between a democracy and dictatorship.

Wink, wink.

Of course, he can.

Carlos Fernández de Cossío is director general of U.S. affairs at Cuba’s Foreign Ministry.

But his job is to distract us from the facts and convince Americans that the brutal July 11 crackdown on thousands of protesters across the island, which we can clearly see on dozens of videos — and is ongoing — is simply appropriate policing.

Clever and bombastic, Fernández de Cossío is on a media tour direct from Havana to Americans’ television sets. The propaganda war to discredit the historic, unprecedented massive protests is in full swing.

Using Cuba’s famed fortress of El Morro as a backdrop — and via the flawless internet connection denied to other Cubans — he delivers the regime’s propagandist talking points in concise soundbites that draw on American politics.

Unrest in Cuba is handled “natural, like in any country,” he claims, equating unarmed, peaceful people walking down their streets calling for “¡Libertad!” with the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to topple democracy.

Classic deflection, to say the least.

“As is natural, there have been detentions in Cuba and there have been arrests and people have been prosecuted,” Fernández de Cossío said to journalist Christiane Amanpour on PBS Wednesday night. “You have the example of Jan. 6 in the United States, where hundreds of people were detained, hundreds of people have been arrested and some are being prosecuted. The same thing is happening in Cuba.”

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After 53 seconds packed with lies that go unchallenged, Amanpour picks up on the Capitol-attack angle and, rightly so, tells him the difference is that those people arrested in the United States have due process, “not the case in Cuba.”

But then she qualifies that with the soft “no lawyers in some cases,” citing the case of a journalist under house arrest, when the truth is that Cuba has been holding summary trials and handing down long sentences for no other crime than what we would label right-to-protest and Cuba calls agitating unrest and worse.

Finally, she asks point-blank: “Why are these people who simply shouted libertad or life and freedom on the streets being put in jail?”

He wriggles out of answering: “I’m surprised by what you’re saying,” then depicts the Cuban justice system as if it were a replica of ours in America. It’s hard to hear so many lies packed into another long soundbite of pure propaganda.

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Citizen journalism vs. propaganda

It’s so easy to call his bluff.

Information about what happened is available in quantity and quality seldom seen before from a police state like Cuba, a Communist military dictatorship that keeps a tight lid on information. This was a videotaped rebellion.

Maybe, but highly unlikely, Fernández de Cossío missed the video of police breaking into a house, guns drawn and shots firing, as a mother screams, “There are children here!”

Her cries continue after police leave with her wounded husband: “They destroyed my house! They shot him down and they threw him in a truck like a pig.”

The floor is splattered with blood.

The question to ask Fernández de Cossío: Explain this one.

This video and many others are perfect examples of citizen journalism, the reporting and dissemination of news by the public via the internet.

In the United States, we verify and publish them — and ask lots of questions. Yet for some reason, Cuban officials often get the break from U.S. journalists they won’t afford their own government.

Influencing U.S. policy

Amanpour and/or PBS tout Fernández de Cossío’s appearance as “a rare interview.”

Hardly.

The guy has been on at least three networks and yapping on Twitter using the same exact talking points since President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s horrific response to the protests brought Cuba worldwide attention.

An angry Díaz-Canel called on Cuban “revolutionaries” to take back the streets and fight their neighbors, armed young people with clubs and bused them into neighborhoods to beat protesters. Riot police and special forces weren’t good enough for the Cuban leader.

But Fernández de Cossío gets away with portraying all this as normal — and journalists who deftly and rightly challenged Trump and his administration have trouble articulating questions. No questions about Díaz-Canel inciting people much like President Trump did.

Why does what Fernández de Cossío says (more like pounds on) to Americans matter?

Díaz-Canel and other top-ranking Cuban leaders can’t communicate in English, and so their tweet and video wars in Spanish mostly stay in the insular world of Cubans and Latin Americans. But Fernández de Cossío has a language advantage.

He’s obviously trying to influence U.S. policy by delivering propaganda to the voting public, and also through the international community, which watches U.S. network news.

He’s the man who cracks American codes. And does he know how to use our politics (especially Florida’s), our weak points, against us to make Cuba look better.

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He also lies with a straight face.

He denies that the Cuban government took down the internet to prevent more sharing, both internally and to the outside world, what was going on.

“Only sporadic interruption of some services,” he told Amanpour and, also, Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC.

Literally, he said the exact same thing to both journalists, diminishing an act of censorship that left the unarmed Cuban population defenseless during a long night and day of beatings, round-ups and smaller but defiant confrontations outside neighborhood police stations protesting arrests.

But at least we learned one thing. Now we know that Cuba’s official excuse for repression is the assault on the U.S. Capitol.