Information Surprises / Regina Coyula

The unrestricted access to news information, brought me some surprises. The first of them is that the digital Granma* is a light version of the printed one, and when I entered the site for Granma Internacional, it was as if they were talking about another country.

The second surprise was that the Palestinians also kill Israelis–I had only read in the press of my country about the massacres the Jews carry out against the Arabs–in the same way that I had discovered that the governments of Libya and Syria murder and repress their citizens.

I also was surprised with the assessment that the 15-M protests in Spain could have ended with a bombing of NATO, because the truth is that all that was more calm and organized within its spontaneous nature, although my family was very worried about me being in an unstable country and in a violent situation, according to what the national media was reporting.

But what surprised me most was knowing the life in one of the most happy countries in the world after China and North Korea!, a statistic elaborated by… North Korea, in which the United States is in last place. If I had not seen it in El País, I would have thought that it was about a joke from Granma.

Translated by: BW

*Granma is the daily official newspaper of the Cuban government

June 16 2011