Following the death of communist butcher Fidel Castro on Black Friday, the Cuban exiles and their descendants took to the streets of Little Havana in Miami, Florida to celebrate the turning point for Cuba. But on NBC’s Sunday Today, reporter Andrea Mitchell glowed about the communist leader and shared her memories of him. “[Castro] was a voracious reader … And very, very aware of everything that was going on, very, very smart and very wedded to his revolutionary ideology,” Mitchell opined from Havana, Cuba.
Throughout her whole report Mitchell failed to mention the celebrations taking place in Miami, but did detail the mourning in Cuba. “Here in Havana, many people, especially the older generation, all reacting emotionally to the death of Fidel Castro,” Mitchell reported, “One woman overcome with grief, she says, ‘For me he is not dead.’”
She even drew attention to Elian Gonzalez, who she quoted as saying, “’I wanted to show him everything I achieved that he would be proud of me. That's how it was with Fidel.’” Mitchell brushed over the whole Elian Gonzalez saga by simply calling it, “a national cause for Fidel Castro.” She failed to mention how her beloved Clintons had Gonzalez taken from relatives at gunpoint and shipped back to the communist island.
“Cuban TV paid tributes all day and all night to the founder of the revolution, still a towering figure in the nation's imagination,” Mitchell went on say. She recalled one interview she had with the murderer, “Once telling me, ‘There will be no problem if I die tomorrow because we have lots of young people who are well trained who know what to do.’”
The NBC reporter seemed fearful for how President-Elect Donald Trump’s Cuba policy would affect the communist country:
But, now we have to see what the reaction is going to be from the US side and there is basically a holding action here. They're very nervous about what to expect and the fact that President Obama has been so heavily invested in the changes the expectation is they can be undone. And they can be undone by canceling the executive orders.
Following her report Mitchell reminisced about her past encounters with the late dictator. “We would argue, he would have dinners or meetings or interviews starting at midnight going to 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning so sometimes hard just to keep up with him,” recounted Mitchell, “And he was a voracious reader questioning me about the politics and the economy in the US.”