Krugman, Obama, Granma and HIV. What Do They Have in Common?

With title "El Presidente se Rinde", the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba has lifted off an article by Nobel Prize of Economics Paul Krugman and take it out of context to use as a propaganda tool against the Obama administration. Placing the  source of the propaganda message inside enemy lines is a propaganda technic that has been used for long and no less by Joseph Goebbels against the British and the Russians during WWII. It was also used by the Soviets against the Americans and it is known that the myth of the HIV virus that gave way to the AIDS epidemic in the 80's was planted by the KGB in an Indian newspaper. 

"Allan C. Brownfield (1984), reporter for The Washington Inquirer, wrote,

   

   The documentation of the manner in which Moscow has placed false stories in the non-Communist press is massive. In one instance, Alexander Kasnechev, the senior KGB officer in Rangoon, Burma, who defected to the U.S. in 1959, described the Soviet effort to plant such stories. His department was responsible for receiving drafts of articles from Moscow, translating them into Burmese, and then seeing that they were placed in local publications to appear as if they had been written by Burmese authors. The final step was to send copies back to Moscow. From there they were quoted in Soviet broadcasts of publications as evidence of "Burmese opinion" that favored the Communist line. (p. 6)

Among the more sensational Soviet disinformation campaigns was one that charged the United States with developing the virus responsible for acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) for biological warfare. The story first appeared in the October 1985 issue of the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, and it quoted the Patriot, a pro-soviet newspaper in India. Although it was a Soviet tactic to place a story in a foreign newspaper to give it credibility, this time no such story has appeared in India. Despite denials by the U.S. Department of State, the story appeared in the news media of more than 60 countries, including Zimbabwe while the non-aligned countries were having a conference there, and in the October 26, 1986, issue of London's Sunday Express after Express reporters interviewed two people from East Berlin who repeated the story. Subtle variations continued to appear in the world press, including an East German broadcast of the story into Turkey that suggested might be wise to get rid of U.S. bases because of servicemen infected with AIDS. On March 30, 1987, Dan Rather read the following news item on CBS Evening News:

'A Soviet military publication claims the virus that causes AIDS leaked from a U.S. army laboratory conducting experiments in biological warfare. The article offers no hard evidence but claims to be reporting the conclusions of unnamed scientists in the United States, Britain and East Germany. Last October, a Soviet newspaper alleged that the AIDS virus may have been the result or Pentagon or CIA experiments' (CBS Spread Disinformation, 1987)" (Jowett & O'Donnell 19-20).

Cuba's propaganda machinery has used the same methods regularly, known as the Deflective Source Model and the Legitimate Source Model (Jowett & O'Donnell. Forms of Propaganda 11-20). In the first case the propagandist sends a message to be replicated so that the recipient thinks the source of information being originated somewhere else than the real locus. In the second case, the propagandist sends the information to an outside source which in turns send it back to the propagandist who sends it to the recipient. 

(On the side, I suspect that the strong negative reaction by Miami residents against Cuban Hip-Hop duet Los Aldeanos was conceived in the Deflective Source Model of propaganda and has its real origin in Havana and not in Miami. )

Official Havana sometimes doesn't even bother to create false information and plant it somewhere else.  They just lift legitimate messages and distort their meaning and intention. This is the case of laureate economist Paul Krugman's article of four days ago in the New York Times titled "The President Surrenders", which appeared today in Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist party of Cuba under the header "El Presidente se Rinde." Here you are coming across a variation of the Legitimate Source Model. One in which the information is not created by the propagandist but manipulated by taking it out of context.

Granma has placed the source of Mr. Krugman's article in Information Clearing House, an Internet news outlet of dubious origin and without the prestige and reach of the New York Times.  You can judge by yourself if the Cubans are getting creative with the Deflective and the Legitimate Source Models of propaganda or if they are simply reproducing Krugman's words. In my viewpoint, by appropriating Paul Krugman's views without even citing the New York Times they are using a variation of the Legitimating Source Model, while at the same time avoiding the monetary, legal and moral troubles that lifting an article from the New York Times would carry with it. To reinforce the propagandist message, Granma has included a horrible caricature of president Obama.

Needless to say, I agree that Mr. Krugman has all the freedom in the world to air his opinions and facts. Freedom of expression is sacred and what I found despicable is the manipulation of Krugman's words by a newspaper that practices anything but freedom of expression and information; and a government whose president Fidel Castro bragged several times to Barbara Walters about the lack of freedom of expression in Cuba.

Fear of the Arab spring uprisings crossing to Cuba makes up for ratification of a 15 years in prison sentence  to USAID contractor Alan Gross. The same fear gives ways to acts of desperate and shameless propaganda manipulation.


Work Cited: Jowett, Garth S. & O' Donnell, Victoria. Propaganda and Persuasion. Sage Publications Inc. Thousand Oaks.

 

Granma, Official Newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba