Cuba is in the news for once again offering material and proximal aid to our adversaries. Our Caribbean neighbor, once a missile base for the Soviets, is now a snooping post for the Chinese.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Warren P. Strobel and Gordon Lubold reported:
China and Cuba have reached a secret agreement for China to establish an electronic eavesdropping facility on the island, in a brash new geopolitical challenge by Beijing to the U.S., according to U.S. officials familiar with highly classified intelligence.
An eavesdropping facility in Cuba, roughly 100 miles from Florida, would allow Chinese intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications throughout the southeastern U.S., where many military bases are located, and monitor U.S. ship traffic.
But worry not, says our government. The Chinese have actually been spying from Cuba since at least 2019:
The White House on Saturday said that China has had a spy base in Cuba since at least 2019 and Beijing’s efforts to expand its intelligence gathering are ongoing.
It added that the Biden administration has taken steps to counter Chinese expansion of its security footprint globally.
Cuba, while oppressing and impoverishing its people, has found the time to be a thorn in the side of the U.S. for over 60 years . . . and the New York Times contributed to the effort.
“I Got My Job Through the New York Times” reads the title of William F. Buckley Jr.’s March 1961 column for the American Legion Magazine condemning the Times‘s fawning over the rebel-turned-dictator Fidel Castro. A cartoon image of Castro perches beside the title, with a rifle formed from the words “Footsie with the Soviets” and “Progressive techniques.”
Buckley describes how Times reporter Herbert Matthews “met Castro in February of 1957. To make contact with him — as he tells the story — he had to get in touch with the Fidelista underground in Havana, drive 500 miles all one night across the length of the island, using his wife as cover . . .” Matthews, finally meeting Castro in the Sierra Maestra mountains, talked with the rebel for three hours. Matthews “became — always consistent with being a writer for The New York Times, which imposes certain inhibitions — the Number One unbearded enthusiast for Fidel Castro.”
Returned to the U.S., Matthews wrote a three-part series hailing the guerrilla’s efforts to bring “liberty, democracy, and social justice” to Cuba. The fallout’s half-life poisons us still today.
Buckley writes:
The impact of these articles all over the world was subsequently recognized even by The New York Times itself, normally bashful about celebrating publicly its achievements. When, almost two years later, Batista fell, the Times permitted itself to record jubilantly: “When a correspondent of The New York Times returned from Senor Castro’s hideout[from that point on, by the way, Senor Castro was elevated by the Times to “Dr.”Castro] . . . the rebel leader attained anew level of importance on the Cuban scene. Nor was the embarrassed government ever able to diminish Fidel Castro’s repute again.”
You can read the rest in the American Legion’s database here (ppg. 18-19; 46-48).
A journalist forgetting to pack his skepticism, and an editor bureau unwilling to call him on it, have done this part of the world no favors for over half a century. Journalism is only as good as the reporter and his editor, a lesson one would hope the “paper of record” wouldn’t need to be reminded of.
Also amazing to me is the early example of using that spurious euphemism “social justice” to suggest moral superiority, as well as bestowing the honorific of “Dr.” on favored hacks and politicians.
Here’s Buckley in 1981 discussing Castro’s Cuba with Antonio Navarro:
