As The Worm Turns

It warms the cockles of my heart to see the list of truth tellers grow. Who'da thunk it? This week, we add The Miami Herald, not known for being particularly fond of their own Miami Cubans. How's this for an editorial?

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Cuba's leader tells another whopper
OUR OPINION: RAUL CASTRO'S LIE REFUTED BY A LEGACY OF SHAME

As a practical matter, it is impossible for this or any other newspaper to set the record straight every time the Cuban government tells a whopper. Orchestrating lies is the specialty of police states. Anyone who has ever listened to Radio Havana or watched a Cuban TV ''news'' program knows that Cuban leaders lie to their own people and lie to the outside world. They even lie to each other. But sometimes the lie is so blatant, so malign, so far removed from the painful reality of life in Cuba that it must be refuted, for the sake of common decency if nothing else.

That's the case with Raúl Castro's recent claim that there has not been ''one sole case of torture'' in Cuba. Even by Cuba's standards, this is an astonishing falsehood, a lie of such outsized proportions that even Raúl Castro should have been ashamed to utter it. But since he was speaking before the National Assembly, where slavish agreement is the only acceptable response to the leader's declarations, it doubtless went down like a smooth cafecito.

The truth, of course, is that torture and the humiliation of government opponents is a way of life in Cuba. The abusive legal and institutional mechanisms of the state deprive the people of Cuba of their most basic rights on a daily basis, and that extends to the practice of torture in Cuba's jails for both common criminals and political prisoners

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The rest of the editorial here.

H/T Gusano at Babalublog