In its latest attempt to manipulate reality and confuse the audience, the Noticiero Nacional de la Televisión Cubana (NTV) dedicated a lengthy report to showcasing testimonies from Cubans in the United States who claim to live in fear due to immigration raids, police violence, and the challenges of legalizing their status.
The objective, disguised as empathy, was actually to reinforce the old propaganda message of the dictatorship: that life for emigrants outside of Cuba is a nightmare and that the "American dream" does not exist.
The report, presented as a humanitarian complaint, was nothing more than another piece of ideological manipulation with which the regime attempted to divert attention from its own responsibility in the migratory tragedy.
For decades, the totalitarian communist regime has expelled millions of Cubans who now live in exile through repression, hunger, and despair. It is the same state that labeled them as "worms," that confiscated their homes, that denied them entry into their own country, and that still charges them exorbitant fees for consular processing.
Now, with a sense of cynicism, he pretends to present himself as a defender of his rights abroad.
The media strategy of the government is as old as it is effective: to select fragments of real testimonies to construct a distorted narrative.
The NTV relied on social media videos, recorded by desperate individuals facing migratory uncertainty, but stripped of any context and, above all, silencing the original cause of their exodus: the failure of the Cuban model.
None of the interviewees spoke about the regime, salaries in Cuba, repression, or the lack of freedoms, but the news report turned them into pieces of a carefully edited narrative to reinforce the image of a cruel and inhumane United States.
The final message of the report —that "the American dream has turned into a nightmare"— aimed to revive an old paternalistic discourse: that of the state warning its citizens that happiness is only achievable within the socialist system.
The irony is that those who produce those pieces have never had to face an immigration raid, a line for bread in Havana, or police repression for having a differing opinion.
The NTV, as the mouthpiece of the authorities, did not show the thousands of videos from Cubans expressing gratitude for the opportunities in the United States, nor the success stories of those who started businesses, studied, or simply live with dignity.
It did not mention that the fear experienced by many Cuban emigrants in exile —like the one shown in the videos— is the same fear that accompanied them from Cuba: the fear of abuse of authority.
The regime needs to portray emigrants as victims of an external enemy to hide the fact that they were victims of the regime first. That is why it uses public television, funded by the taxes of an impoverished population, to fabricate false empathy and feign concern for those it condemned to exile.
While the state media continues to manipulate others' tears for its propaganda, the same causes of the exodus persist on the island: miserable wages, blackouts, censorship, and repression.
No campaign from NTV will be able to hide that the true Cuban drama is not in Miami, but in Cuba.
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