The New York Times Doesn’t Like Trump – Except When it Comes to His Cuba Policy
The New York Times makes no bones about its disdain for Donald Trump.
But when it comes to his Cuba policy, the “paper of record” rarely bothers to hold the administration to account, and its shoddy reporting legitimizes the U.S. government's ongoing economic war on the island.
Such is the case with its most recent article on Cuba, a 1,400-word piece about the Trump administration's attacks on Cuba’s medical missions that does not include a single interview with a Cuban doctor currently serving on one.
Instead, journalist Frances Robles limits her primary sources to two outspoken critics of Cuba's international health programs. The first, Maria Werlau, is the hard-line founder of a U.S.-government-funded organization called Cuba Archive (also known as the Free Society Project). The second is Ramona Matos, a former doctor living in South Florida who has been the poster child for the Miami-led campaign against the medical missions.
But outside of Matos and two other anonymous sources critical of Cuba's international health programs, the voices of Cuban doctors and nurses who voluntarily chose to serve on medical teams abroad are conspicuously absent.
“I have interviewed 270 Cuban doctors working on medical missions. I have never met a doctor who said they were exploited,” said John Kirk, a professor of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University and author of Healthcare without Borders: Understanding Cuban Medical Internationalism.“This is just the U.S. obsession with bringing about regime change in Cuba.”
If you want to hear from the doctors themselves on why they go on the missions and what they’re like, check out Episode 3 of our award-winning documentary series The War on Cuba.
You can also watch this video we did with doctors who volunteered to work abroad during COVID-19.
Also, stay tuned for news about a documentary we recently filmed with a Cuban medical team in Calabria, Italy. It should be released later this year!