Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0273
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Pages: 273160-274
• Author: Benjamin Willis

BOOK REVIEWs 273

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Salim Lamrani, Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 2014) pb 160pp. ISBN: 9781583674710

Reviewed by Benjamin Willis

Salim Lamrani’s Cuba, the Media, and the Challenge of Impartiality is a study of

how corporate control of media outlets can make for highly skewed reporting on

any given topic. The book’s main focus is on the intransigence of the Spanish

daily El País in regard to its editorial stance on Cuba. The newspaper belongs to

Grupo PRISA, which is a major force in the US Spanish-language media and, as

the author suggests, espouses a ‘viewpoint [that] is pervasive throughout the

Western press’. In the introduction, Lamrani poses the question of how can the

media ‘deal impartially with the factual reality ... without going up against the

interests of the financial conglomerates that own them, whose sole purpose is to

maintain the established order?’ (p. 9). The author notes that since 2011 El País

has also been distributed as a supplement to the Miami Spanish-language daily

El Nuevo Herald, a ‘paper that represents the interests of the extreme right of the

Cuban exile community’ (p. 15).

Eight different topics are discussed with Lamrani confronting the ‘assump-

tions’ of El País in its allegedly biased reporting with ‘fact-based reality’. Human

rights, political dissidents, Yoani Sánchez, the Cuban Five, Alan Gross, emigra-

tion to the US and the criticism of Cuba being ‘a social failure’ are all examined

as the author compares what the editors at El País consider ‘fit to print’ with

statistics and testimonies from numerous organisations including the UN,

UNESCO, the WHO, the New England Journal of Medicine, and, thanks to

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the US government operatives who have worked

at what was the United States Interests Section in Havana. In each instance, the

published articles and, more importantly, the omissions of the Spanish daily

stand in stark contrast with the objective opinions and observations by some of

the world’s leading authorities on issues of health, education, human rights and

other pertinent social issues.

Lamrani’s argument at times reads as though it could appear as official pro-

paganda often found in Granma, and for this, he has been derided as a shill for

the Cuban government. However, an overwhelming amount of evidence leads

the reader to agree with his assertion that ‘El País has broken with the covenant

of impartiality essential to any journalistic activity’ and ‘abandoned the field of

information provision for political profit’ (p. 95). Because of the historic

announcements of 17 December 2014 between the two nations, some of the

subjects (Cuban Five, Alan Gross) of the book seem somewhat dated.

Nevertheless, the analysis of how the media played a role in fomenting negative