Western press vitriol against Castro rings hollow, petulant and tone-deaf: Analyst

In the wake of Fidel Castro’s death, American media and officials are talking about human rights in Cuba while Washington is running a torture camp -- Guantanamo Bay -- on the island, according to Daniel Patrick Welch, an American writer and political analyst.

Following the death of the revolutionary Cuban leader on Friday, the Western media, particularly BBC and CNN, quickly denounced Castro as a dictator who had oppressed his own people for decades. 

BBC talked to British academic Dr. Denise Baden, an associate professor at the University of Southampton, who stood her ground despite the anchor's loaded questions about Castro. Baden dismissed the news anchor’s assertion that Castro was a brutal tyrant who was loathed by most Cubans. The interview went viral on social media.

Dr. Baden said the majority of Cubans around the world had a very favorable view of Castro.  She stated that based on her interviews with Cubans living inside the country and in Europe, she realized they have a significantly different view of Castro than the Cubans living in places like Miami, Florida.

Commenting on this, Welch said, “The West is completely in love with its own narrative when it comes to Cuba especially. And it’s shocking and suffocating really, if you live here, to listen to this crap that passes for ‘news’ about Castro and Cuba.”

“You know it’s such a time for mourning and reflecting for billions of people around the world and that time is filled instead with this mean-spirited cackling stupidity, such teddy-like high school tricks, that not lowering the embassy flag at half mast, belittling the enormous triumph of the Cuban revolution, and taking the side of Miami Cubans, who are still butthurt that Castro took back their mansions to build houses for the poor,” he told Press TV on Tuesday. “There is no mention of the mortality rate.”

“And, you know, they have the audacity--they don’t see the irony, of talking about human rights while they maintain a torture camp on that island, on the colonial land that they still refuse to give back. It’s beyond tone-deaf. And I think it’s appropriate that their tone-deaf stupidity resonates beyond to the world,” the analyst said.

“You know the only Western leader who had anything positive to say was Justin Trudeau, and he got nailed for its. Obama sent this mealey-mouthed [condolences], typical of Obama neither here nor there, ‘Ni chichi ni limonada’ as they say in Latin America,” he stated.

“And Trump of course was even worse. He tweeted this fascist tweet like, ‘Fidel Castro is dead!’ again, this gleeful and mean-spirited like I said. It should be kept, even if you are not bereaved it should be respected that world leader, for someone who has been important to billions of people,” the writer said.

“But what’s new? These people are so starved for an alternative that they will latch on to anything, like Trump,” he said.

“In the wake of Castro’s death, we have to reflect what it means to be a revolutionary, and what it means to be anti-imperialist. You see without any alternative, people will latch on to something like trump as anti-imperialist, which is the exact opposite of the legacy of Fidel Castro,” Welch observed. 

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