MIC: "ESPN Tried To Shame Cuba On Poverty And It Backfired Spectacularly"

ESPN Tried To Shame Cuba On Poverty And It Backfired Spectacularly
Zak Cheney-Rice, MIC, March 23, 2016:

During President Barack Obama's historic trip to Cuba this week, the Twitter account for SportsCenter — ESPN's banner TV show — tweeted the following photo of the scene outside Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano, where POTUS was watching a baseball game with Cuban president Raúl Castro on Tuesday:

Meanwhile, next to the stadium in Havana... pic.twitter.com/4nHUzVNO5e

— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) March 22, 2016

The caption read, "Meanwhile, next to the stadium in Havana..." — an apparent attempt to highlight the irony of the most powerful man in the world enjoying a game at a fancy ballpark while the ills of poverty sat right next door.

There was just one problem:

@SportsCenter Meanwhile, outside Citi Field pic.twitter.com/QRCcuReiwD

— Justin Klugh (@justin_klugh) March 22, 2016

Justin Klugh, a sports blogger with SB Nation, responded by tweeting the above image of the scene outside Citi Field in Willet's Point, Queens, where the New York Mets play baseball.

If anything, the shot from the U.S. looks even starker than the one from Cuba.



Willet's Point is one of New York City's most structurally devastated neighborhoods. In 2013, it was described by the New York Times as a "blighted area" marked by a "tangle of auto shops" and potholed, oil-slicked streets that looked "as if they had been blasted by land mines." ...

A handful of other Twitter users followed Klugh's post by tweeting images of different areas where multi-million dollar coliseums seem to have been dropped in the middle of America's poorest neighborhoods: ...

Willets Point literally does not have have sidewalks or sewers. pic.twitter.com/g4K4AV3ZhC

— Barry Petchesky (@barryap1) March 22, 2016

See also: here.