If conservatives were doing their job in the information war, more Americans would know the history of mass murderer Che Guevara and Obama would never have been able to get away with posing for this picture. Here’s John Zmirak writing at The Stream:
President Obama’s visit to Cuba is many things to many people. To the far-left in America, it is a victory dance on the grave of Cold War anti-Communism, which once embraced the likes of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson along with Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower. To the Cuban regime, it’s a moment of triumphant vindication, which validates the Castro brothers’ 60-year narrative: An embattled island republic that stood up bravely against its domineering leviathan neighbor (the USA), through boycotts, CIA machinations and even the collapse of its Soviet ally, pioneering a new society despite it all. And now even the American president comes to its shores, as if to make reparation and apology.
To American progressives like CNN reporter Chris Cuomo (son of the left-wing New York governor Mario), Obama’s visit is some cross between a honeymoon and a homecoming. As Newsbusters reported, Cuomo covered the story from Cuba
wearing his father’s guayabera shirt, which was “given to him by Fidel Castro as a gift.” Cuomo, who was covering President Obama’s visit to Cuba, underlined that “it didn’t mean something to him [his father] because it came from Fidel Castro necessarily, but because it marked conversations going on decades ago that were the same as those today.”
The anchor summarized that for his father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, “the concern was the freedom of the people. What is the point of this communist regime if it is not to truly make everyone equal — not at the lowest level; not by demoralizing everyone; but lifting everyone up? My father, generations of politicians, have been fighting this. So, I wear this shirt as a reminder of that, and of my pop.”
Images can seal a narrative in place. Some horrifying war photos from South Vietnam may have sealed the fate of the American war for that country. And the image that comes to us from Obama’s visit to pay court to Fidel and Raul Castro is of the U.S. president standing with Cuban dignitaries, strategically posed against the backdrop of a building with a huge graffiti portrait of Che Guevara.
That photo wasn’t an accident. It has all the earmarks of a carefully managed photo op, to which Obama consented. It’s a “symbolic” shot, like an image of a U.S. politician in Israel kissing the Wailing Wall, or bowing to meet the pope. Such religious comparisons are only too apropos, since Communism in the 20th century rose to the significance of a world religion, inspiring millions of zealots from Chile to Cambodia to spy on their own governments, betray their country’s interests, hijack labor unions, engage in violent revolutions — and then, once in power, to trample the rights to life, liberty and property of hundreds of millions of other people.
Read more: The Stream
Image credit: www.barbwire.com.
