On Western Bias Against Cuba

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.1.0016
• Published date: 01 April 2017
• Date: 01 April 2017
• Pages: 16-18
• Author: Denise Baden

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CUBAN STUDIES 9.1 SPRING 2017

ARTICLEARTICLE

ON WESTERN BIAS AGAINST CUBA

Denise Baden

University of Southampton, UK

The media merry-go-round following the death of Fidel Castro has now come to

a halt, and so, six months after his death, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on

the Western portrayal of one of the longest serving political leaders in history.

Naturally, bearing in mind the history of the imperialist US attitude towards

Cuba, and the nationalisation of US property by the Castro government shortly

after the revolution, the hostility between the two is perhaps understandable.

Yet what surprised me greatly was the response of the UK media following

Castro’s death. In Britain, the overwhelmingly negative views of a few Miami

émigrés, who celebrated his passing, was given massive prominence, while the

millions of mourners who had lost their leader were overlooked.

I came to do research in Cuba for the first time in 2014 and knew little about

the island until that point. On that journey, I was struck by story after story

from Cubans about how they saw Fidel as a father figure – brave, heroic, larger

than life and mostly beloved. So it was shocking for me to hear Fidel repeatedly

described as a brutal dictator in the UK media following his death. This is not to

say that all Cubans were uncritical of Fidel, far from it, but for a leader who had

been in power for that long, the regard which most Cubans felt for him was

remarkable.

Following Castro’s death, the news channel BBC 24 invited me in to talk

about my experience of doing research in Cuba and what I had learned about

Fidel. I was taken aback to find myself bombarded with anti-Castro questions

from the interviewer, based not on any evidence, but on misinformation that had

been uncritically repeated so often that it had begun to be taken as fact. It seemed

to me that little interest was displayed in obtaining a genuine understanding of

the Cuban experience.

The fact that the BBC, of all media outlets, was happy, even keen, to repeat

such one-sided and inaccurate material was revelatory. Clearly, I was not alone