The Scrapbook doesn’t fault our peers in the business for looking for creative ways to make a buck in a challenging media landscape. Then again, it’s almost always easy to find fault with the New York Times. For a few years now, the media behemoth has been organizing trips to exotic locales with reporters and writers for the paper serving as tour guides. Nothing wrong with that—we’ve done a version of that with our very own Weekly Standard cruises! (Speaking of which, book now for the December 4 sailing from Ft. Lauderdale, at TWSCruise.com.)
But apparently it’s not enough for the Times that such trips serve as enjoyable excursions—their value-added proposition is finding ways for such trips to confirm the political worldview of the NPR-tote bag set and getting them to pay handsomely for having their consciousness raised. For a mere $6,595, for instance, you can learn about “Women and Women’s Rights in Cuba” on an upcoming trip this November:
The fact that “Revolution” is capitalized seems to be a tipoff as to where the Times‘s sympathies lie. Certainly saying there are “still roadblocks and challenges” to life in a murderous dictatorship (more than a million people and counting have fled from it) is a choice bit of revisionism. As for the suggestion that Cuba is “leading the charge” in women’s rights, well, Walter Duranty’s employer has long had issues with telling the truth about life under communism. Here’s how Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs—not exactly a right-wing outfit—describes life for women in Cuba:
“In actuality, employed women in Cuba do not hold positions of power—either political or monetary. The Cuban Congress, although elected by the people, is not the -political body that truly calls the shots. The Cuban Communist Party—only about 7 percent of which is made up of women—holds true political power. Markedly, the systems of evaluating gender equality in other countries around the world aren’t universally applicable, as women are much less represented in the true governing body of Cuba than we are led to believe. In addition, the professions that are usually synonymous with monetary wealth and the power and access that come with it (doctors, professors, etc.) do not yield the same financial reward here. Doctors and professors are technically state-employed and, therefore, earn the standard state wage of about $30 per month. This means women employed in these traditionally high-paying fields are denied access to even monetary power as a form of establishing more of an equal footing with men. Evidently, in Cuba, women can be well employed but not where it matters.”
Finally, because subjecting oneself to the whitewashing of Castro’s crimes isn’t enough fun for a week-long trip, the guests of the Times will also get to “discuss female reproductive rights with a women’s health specialist.” We know the Times and enough of its readers are so lacking in self-awareness that this trip will probably be a success by any number of superficial measures. But anyone who cared about the callous treatment of human life in Cuba would insist this trip be aborted.
