100 Acres & a Fool

The legacy media has always been fixated on Cuba and Fidel Castro. Since the communist revolutionary led an uprising out of the hills that forced out the Batista regime, they have fawned over Castro in spite of a human rights record that has been stunningly oppressive and has turned a once vibrant island nation into a dreary "workers paradise" where land can't be owned and words spoken against the Castro junta will result in imprisonment or death. The media crows about the literacy rate but airbrushes the crackdown on dissidents. They hail the Cuban model while not reporting the squalid living conditions of most residents.

But jeez, if an American even misses one meal--even when they could afford to miss several--it's a major story.

Here, in another puff piece on Cuba, the media exalts the Cuban regime for allowing up to one hundred acres of "government land" for private use by farmers:

HAVANA - Communist officials decreed yesterday that private farmers and cooperatives can use up to 100 acres of idle government land, as President Raul Castro works to revive Cuba's agricultural sector.

While the individual parcels are small, the widespread transfer of farmland from public to private hands could change the face of farming in a country where the government controls more than 90 percent of the economy.
...

Landless Cubans can be given a bit more than 33 acres, while those who already have fully producing plots can add enough state lands to bring their total holdings to 100 acres.

Wow, they will be "given" up to 100-acres for growing use? Maybe the government under Raul Castro is softening their stance on private land ownership and loosening the reins on the strict communist monetary system. Or maybe not:

The new measure does not say where farmers will sell their output. Nearly all private farmers are now required to sell most of their produce beyond what they eat themselves to the state.

Marxian indeed.

Now ask yourself this why the hell this piece was even published. If it had been Mugabe giving white farmers back their land it would be news. The AP/Inqy wanted nothing more than to print a headline that sounded as though there were actually reforms happening in the island prison and this non-story allowed them to do that.