By Benjamin Noria
HAVANA TIMES – I really don’t want to upset anyone with this article, but the daily briefings by Dr. Francisco Duran, National Director of Epidemiology at Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health, at 9 AM, in front of Cuban TV cameras: is a show. As a result, I think it should be called: The Duran Show.
The show is a spectacle that catches your attention and sparks an inclination and interest because of its entertainment factor and sensationalism. The Cuban government uses it as part of what we call in the political sciences: mind control, which involves methods of modifying mental processes in individuals, and control and manipulation of the mind.
What benefits does the Duran show have for the Cuban government? Well, it keeps the population busy with these pandemic statistics, so they don’t think about the national economic situation today. Like many other efforts in the past, this is a strategy to divert the Cuban people’s attention away from the most important things.
A day has 24 hours and we use 8 of them to sleep, 8 to work, etc. The government puts on two hours of Mesa Redonda, 1 hour of the Duran Show, 1 hour and 30 minutes of news, etc. There’s no doubt that this is keeping the population’s mind busy.
Why fool ourselves? For example, everyone who has seen the Stanley Kubrick movie called: Full Metal Jacket, and the scene where the lieutenant appears giving instructions to military journalists during a break in the Vietnam War, realizes that the news items are fabricated. We’re not exempt from this in Cuba.
The statistics that Dr. Duran presents might be real. Only God will know. Plus, how many countries are dedicating 1 hour of airtime on national TV and resources to talk about the pandemic’s evolution? It happens in nationalist and totalitarian countries like Cuba where the government controls the media and needs to compensate for their failure to create a Welfare State by resorting to other means to win over the population and stay in power.
Due to the discreet repression that exists, very few people know that everything people see in Cuba first passes through the Communist Party’s Ideological Department’s filter. Nothing is broadcast or published without first being analyzed by this Department and getting its green light.
The people who remember the court hearings for little Elian Gonzalez’s return, unfortunately know that the government turned it into a show. Just like the Ubre Blanca cow event in 1982 became a show, and the battle for the release of the Cuban 5. They took great political advantage out of these events. Today, the pandemic is the show of the hour.
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