MediaWatch: March 1988
Table of Contents:
Today's Cuba
"There is, in Cuba, government intrusion into everyone's life, from the moment he is born until the day he dies. The reasoning is that the government wants to better the lives of its citizens and keep them from exploiting or hurting one another." This quote from NBC News reporter Ed Rabel typified the view conveyed by Sunday Today's February 28 broadcast from communist Cuba.
Co-host Maria Shriver and an NBC crew traveled to Cuba ostensibly to interview Cuban leader Fidel Castro who wanted his rebuttal of drug smuggling charges against him to reach a U.S. TV audience, but another development at the time also highlighted Cuba. Just a few weeks before, the State Department released its "Country Reports on Human Rights," naming Cuba one of the two worst oppressors.
But Sunday Today's look into both these charges was anything but probing. In fact, Today's conciliatory approach allowed Castro to spew lies about his drug connections and the wonderful achievements of the Cuban revolution.
The show began with excerpts from Shriver's Castro interview. Seven of the 13 questions she asked dealt with the recent drug allegations brought out by former Panamanian official Jose Blandon. All that Shriver got Castro to say was that Blandon was lying. Demonstrating how ill-prepared she was, at no time did Shriver confront Castro with the long-standing drug connection that dates back to 1982 U.S. indictments of four senior Castro aides.
On human rights, Shriver managed only slight reference to "high numbers of political prisoners who have told of suffering in Cuba's prisons," which Castro dismissed, saying "all that is a lie." Shriver seemed satisfied as she failed to confront Castro with political prisoner figures that approach 15,000, according to the Cuban Human Rights Committee, an internal group led by Marxist opposition leader Ricardo Bofill. Shriver was well aware of the situation since, as MediaWatch has learned, Today producers received extensive briefings by Amnesty International just before the trip. What did Shriver spend time on? The Cuban missile crisis, Soviet leader Khrushchev, and the assassination of her uncle, President Kennedy.
Showing who really controlled the visit, viewers then saw highlights of Castro's guided tour of Havana, complete with adoring crowds cheering him. Shriver, who tagged along, occasionally tried to let viewers know that life in Cuba is really not as rosy as Castro's selective tour showed, but still ended up relaying an image of Castro as popular reformer and a man of "incredible stamina." Dismissing the injustices in Cuba that the U.S. human rights report detailed, including repression of religion and no freedom to choose an occupation, Shriver mimicked her host's propaganda line: "The level of public services was remarkable: free education, medicine, and heavily subsidized housing."
Reporter Ed Rabel continued the non-adversarial approach when he accompanied a regime-chosen family on a Sunday outing, saying Cuban officials consider them "a triumph over racial and economic discrimination, an affirmation that Fidel Castro's revolution works." Rabel characterized Cubans as pleased with the life Castro has brought:
"The worker's earn about five dollars a day....It doesn't sound like much, but consider this: at a government daycare center, pre-school children of the workers are taken care of for a small fee...their health care needs are looked after, they're fed three times a day, and they appear happy and healthy. Older children...go to boarding school through the week. [They] are on a course...that will take them all the way through the university completely free of charge."
While Rabel allowed a little time for some Cuban dissidents to speak and a later story from Miami summarized Cuban-American sentiment toward Castro, Rabel's conclusion about life in Cuba demonstrated how gullible NBC had become. Said Rabel: "This year Cuba celebrates its 30th anniversary of the revolution....On a sunny day in the park in the city of Havana, it is difficult to see anything that is sinister."
After repeated phone calls, MediaWatch reached Senior Producer Penelope Fleming, who accompanied Shriver and Rabel to Cuba. She declined comment on two occasions, explaining she was in the middle of a "crisis" and unable to discuss the show. However, as Mario Portuondo, a concerned Cuban American National Foundation official told MediaWatch: "The program served only to confirm the existence of a double standard." Can you imagine NBC letting a less than perfect pro-U.S. leader off so easily?
