Babalu Blog: The Name of the Crop

September 16, 2008

The Name of the Crop

Today in a marvelously upbeat article for Reuters, Marc Frank reassures us that not only will the devastation in Cuba lead to accelerated reform, but also, thankfully, Cuba's "main economic engines" were spared. Okay, I'm thinking, tourism, tobacco, nickel. How's that? Ah, silly me. Here's Frank's assessment:

The serious damage inflicted on sugar, tobacco, citrus and coffee might have been a death blow when they were the base for the Cuban economy in the 1990s, but the importance of those sectors has diminished as new economic foundations have been built.

These days, 74 percent of GDP and foreign exchange earnings come from services such as tourism and the sending of medical personnel to Venezuela and other countries.

Set aside tourism, although I fail to see how the hurricanes will not have an impact on same. Take a look at the last sentence. Tourism is a single noun, so grammatically the and should also be followed by a noun. Instead, Frank is forced to twist it to "the sending of medical personnel to Venezuela and other countries." Why the faulty parallel structure? Sending a captive population out to work for you has a name, doesn't it? I guess it doesn't when the population in question is Cuban.

Posted by rsnlk at September 16, 2008 04:58 PM

Comments

You are aware that Marc Frank, prior to be hired by Reuters, was a "reporter" for the People's Daily World (before it became a weekly), that's the official organ of Communist Party USA, aren't you?

He wrote over 1,000 articles for that rag and now cover Cuba, I am sure very objectively.

Posted by: Henry Louis Gomez at September 16, 2008 06:43 PM

Thanks, but yup. Might make him kinda resistant to using the word "slavery," huh.

Posted by: rsnlk at September 16, 2008 06:47 PM

So, let me see, tourism according to Marc Frank is one of Cuba's important economic engines and that was spared? The country is devastated with floods, homelessness, hunger, disease, mosquitoes, destruction of crops, etc... and yet, the tourism sector has been spared, since Havana didn't receive a head-on-blow? So, even if not one Havana building collapsed during these storms [something that is very unlikely], Havana is somehow suspended in some sort of vacuum vis-a-vis the rest of Cuba and there will be no secondary effects, or fall out from the destruction of the storm that will affect it? Ah, why doesn't this sound plausible?

Also Frank is unquestioningly repeating official stats. If the government says that the country lost 10.5 of its GDP, you can triple that at least.

How nice that you can always depend on the mainstream media to act as castro, inc's propaganda piece in the free world! No need to sell GRAMMA when the news that we read is gotten directly from Prensa Latina's press releases.

Posted by: Ray at September 17, 2008 04:12 AM