Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom

Perhaps I am committing a Newsvine No-No here, writing an article about another article, which should simply be seeded. If it is, I apologize. The thing is, there is a lot I would like to quote, and highlight, and make sure that gets noticed. The article in question, Packing up home 'easy' in needy Cuba, deals with a journalist for the BBC leaving Cuba. The reason he is leaving Cuba, is because (journalists words) :

I was one of three foreign correspondents to be stripped of their press accreditation by the Cuban government. Our reporting was deemed "negative" by a nameless committee.

So lets stop for a second. A country, stripping press accreditation for having deemed reporting 'negative' by a nameless committee. Right off the bat, we see there is no "freedom of the press" in Castro's fiefdom. While most in the free world argue that the media is biased to the left, or to the right, we have countries where it is apparent there is none. It does not exist. A nameless committee decides who stays, and who goes, what is acceptable, and what is not. And yet people defend this system, and tell us we can learn from it !?! If this happened in any other country in the world, the media would pounce all over the issue. Yet most are unusually silent.

Censorship is not simply done with the the press. The author relates this story, about the film "Rwanda"

One Saturday night, a couple of years ago, the Oscar-nominated film was put on Cuban state television.

I was at home watching it, when, a few minutes after the opening titles, I noticed that some shots had been clumsily repeated. It had been edited.

I happened to have a DVD of the original version. I put it on to compare the two.

It became obvious that the Cuban censors had gone to the trouble of cutting out a 30 second portion of the film. The banned images contained a couple of harmless jokes about Cuban cigars.

Jokes?? The State censors films, in this case, because of jokes?? What can we learn from a country that censors films because of jokes?? In a delicious case of irony, Michael Moore's film "Sicko, which was a puff piece on the "wonders" of the Cuban "Health care system" was deemed subversive and banned by the very same censors who edited these subversive jokes.

What is the Cuban government afraid of? Could it be that freedom of the press would lead the Cuban people to realize the load of crap they have been fed since 1959? The author ends his article nicely with this:

Those that support the revolution believe that their future is in good hands. Those that yearn for change feel that things are out of their hands.

Given that, would it really threaten the status quo if you could buy a foreign paper in the streets of Havana? Or if the foreign press in Cuba were able to act a little more freely?

I doubt it. But clearly someone right at the top feels that such an experiment is not worth the risk.

The great Cuban poet and hero Jose Marti summed up my feelings nicely when he said "Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom."