‘Dynamic’ Obama Lectures ‘Bumbling’ Castro on Race Relations in Cuba , While Wilfully Blind to Black Lives Matter Movement in the US

This chapter studies press coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba in March, 2016. The study compares the cliches of Cuba in press coverage to academic studies of Cuban realities, from pre-revolutionary days in the 1950s, to the present day. The coverage may be readily seen as part of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman’s Propaganda Model of news media, relating to a number of the five filters, such as media ownership and profit orientation, the reliance on advertising and pursuant promotion of capitalism, and the anti-communism or ideology filter, which opposes nationalism anywhere other than the U.S. The press coverage of Obama’s visit provided no indication of what Noam Chomsky has identified as the real reason for the embargo against Cuba: the pro-capitalist ‘rotten apple’ or virus theory. That is, if Cuba is allowed to flourish on its own, unimpeded, then the ‘virus’ of socialism could spread to other Central American countries, as indeed it has done in the past decade. One can see here explicitly that this concern and the Cuban example are central to a Chomskyan analysis of international affairs and specifically US foreign policy. Similarly, these results comply with the findings of other contemporary writers such as Chris Hedges, Stephen Kinzer and William Blum.