The New York Times' Reportage on Cuba: All the Lies that Fit In Print

Roger Cohen's cover article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine is both too long and too filled with factual errors of every kind to refute it in just one post. So we shall dedicate 100 or so to it. This should see us through what remains of this year and will be a fitting coda for the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro's enthronement, for which The New York Times, more than any other newspaper, is responsible. Indeed, only the U.S. government itself, taking its cues from The Times, played a larger role in installing Communism in Cuba.

After 50 years of unrelenting tyranny, the heirs of Herbert Matthews have handed down their final verdict on Fidel Castro:

75% Good25% Bad
So much for those who expected a 50th anniversary apology from The New York Times for inflicting on us Herbert Matthews' "Jeffersonian democrat." Of course, there has been no apology either from The Times for concealing the Ukrainian Famine so that Stalin could consolidate his power or for dismissing reports of The Holocaust because the Ochs-Sultzbergers did not want The New York Times labelled a "Jewish newspaper."

All that is now blood under the presses, long dried and nearly forgotten. Our story, though, is still in the news and our blood has not yet congealed.