Why isn’t there any mention of Alan Gross on EcuRed?

The founding of the website EcuRed — Cuba’s newest propaganda tool — reaffirms one long-standing principle of comparative international politics. Communists suck at naming things.

The phenomenon is understandable. Communists were never schooled in the capitalist skill of marketing. The Soviet Union never had a “branding” initiative at the Politburo.

EcuRed was created by — get this name — the Youth Club of Electronics & Computers of Havana. The name of EcuRed’s founding organization conjures up visions of serious young people in uniforms, all gazing into the screen of an old cathode-ray tube monitor. Perhaps they meet in an otherwise barren office with a 20-year-old picture of Fidel peeling from the wall. If they want to complete the picture, perhaps they could simply rename themselves the Internet Brown Shirts.

Of course that is a silly suggestion. Our own FCC no doubt has a plan to claim the domain names InternetBrownShirts.gov, .org and .com any day now. Though, given the wimpiness of the Obama administration when it comes to Havana, the White House would probably have the FCC sign the domain names over to the Cubans if they asked nicely.

In essence, EcuRed purports to be, with a few exceptions, the Cuban version of Wikipedia. Each article on Wikipedia notes that material posted without a source may be removed. EcuRed probably has a similar process for addressing any proposed changes in content. But, in the Castro tradition of free speech, instead of the inaccurate posting being removed, the person challenging it can be removed…literally…permanently… forever.

Even by the lax standards of internet reporting, EcuRed is a sham. The bloggers on birther websites would have to scoff at how completely baseless and biased the EcuRed articles are. Ya gotta have some journalistic standards, after all.

But that assumes you are at least trying to tell the truth. EcuRed is simply a propaganda tool, but one that has the potential to reach far more people than Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union until 1991, or Pravda’s little brother, the Cuban Communist Party rag Granma.

Perhaps the most direct evidence that this new website is a propaganda tool of the Castro regime is the fact that there is no EcuRed listing for Alan Gross.

The sad & strange story of Alan Gross

Alan Gross is a 60-year-old American U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor. He has been wasting away in a Cuban jail for over a year, despite never having been formally charged with any crime.

A husband and father of two daughters, Gross worked for a company in Maryland that gave him a portion of their USAID grant to deliver cell phones and computers to Cuba’s Jewish community. He had made five trips to Cuba in nine months distributing equipment. According to an article in the Washington Post, Gross had “also helped the Cubans download music, Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica off flash drives.”

As he tried to leave the island in December of 2009, Gross was arrested. Although he has never been charged with any crime, Cuban officials now claim that Gross is an American spy.