August IWMFWire
Crackdown in Cuba

Despite Castro’s new repression, independent journalists fight on

The international community had been changing its view of Cuba in the last few years, buoyed by an opposition movement that had gained momentum despite Fidel Castro’s 44-year grip on power. That movement was brought to a halt beginning in March, when the Cuban government began a fast and furious crackdown on dissidents. Since then, some 80 people deemed dissidents, including 28 independent journalists, have been sentenced to prison terms of from 14 to 27 years during trials that often lasted only a few hours.

While the unexpected crackdown has muffled dissenting voices, analysts and Western journalists say that Cuba’s independent media remain committed to getting out news that contradicts the country’s Communist-party propaganda.

Cuba’s First Independent Magazine

Cuba’s growing dissident movement first received widespread attention in May 2002 following the visit to the country by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. During his visit, Carter brought attention to the Varela Project, a Havana-based effort to circulate a petition seeking free elections and free expression that had collected some 11,000 signatures.

At the same time, independent journalists were stretching their boundaries. Last year 27 independent newsletters were written and distributed among a small group of people in Cuba, according to Janisset Rivero Gutierrez, executive director of the Miami-based Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Directorate, which has aided and assisted human rights activists in Cuba since 1990.

In addition, independent journalists, who often reported about Cuba for the European, Latin American and U.S. media, began pushing the limits of free speech within their own country. Recently, Cuba got its first independent magazine, De Cuba, founded by journalist Ricardo Gonzalez Alfonso. Such progress made Castro’s swift response all the more shocking. De Cuba’s second issue came out shortly before March 18, when police began arresting dissidents.

“There was a feeling among the dissident movement in general that they had won more space,” says Lucia Newman, CNN’s Havana bureau chief. “They felt like the government was in a position that they couldn’t crack down on the opposition right now because it was going to reflect very negatively on the country’s image at a time when they were looking toward an opening with the United States and Europe.”

Real Life Versus Make-Believe

In a Washington Post editorial written before his arrest and published on April 20, Cuban journalist Marcelo Lopez Banobre wrote, “The wave of searches, confiscations and especially detentions that began on March 18 is the most serious I have witnessed. Among those arrested and jailed are two dozen of Cuba’s best independent journalists who had been trying to portray real life here – not the make-believe life that foreigners are shown or that the official media portray.”

Lopez Banobre was arrested on March 25 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. De Cuba’s Gonzalez Alfonso and well-known writer Raul Rivero, who was a consultant to De Cuba, were arrested on March 18. Each received a 20-year sentence. Independent journalist Omar Rodriguez Saludes received the longest sentence, 27 years.

“It is clear that the Cuban government does not tolerate press freedom,” says Carlos Lauria, program director for the Americas division of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Jailing and incarceration of journalists is one of the most effective techniques employed by repressive regimes like the Cuban government to control the media.”

The timing of the arrests is not coincidental, he says. “The Cuban government took clear advantage that the international attention at the time of the crackdown was focused on the war with Iraq.” CPJ has a section on its website devoted to monitoring repression in Cuba, and it now features the latest edition of De Cuba. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders created an online petition to President Castro calling for the journalists’ release.

Coping with the Crackdown

The crackdown has not silenced Cuba’s independent journalists, according to Directorate’s Rivero Gutierrez, who says, “This crackdown has given them more commitment and they are willing to continue fighting for freedom.”

Ninoska Perez Castellon, who has interviewed numerous Cuban dissidents on her radio talk show on WQBA in Miami, also remains optimistic that the crackdown won’t destroy the press freedom movement in Cuba. “I’m sure that for every dissident that’s in prison others will again continue with the same work, but [the crackdown] makes it very difficult for them,” she says. Perez Castellon is also a member of the board of directors for the Cuban Liberty Council, a Miami-based organization that disseminates information on Cuba.

Perez Castellon says that the concern of the remaining dissidents is for the safety of those imprisoned, many of whom have been denied medical care or have been moved to remote facilities. While the Cuban government does not allow independent verification of its prisons, according to information gathered by Reporters Without Borders, conditions in them are deplorable.

Continued Harassment

The Cuban government continues to harass remaining journalists. According to a June 1 report by the Florida Sun-Sentinel’s Havana correspondent, Vanessa Bauza, “Independent journalists such as [Roberto] Garcia who are still filing reports to foreign websites say they have been visited by state security officials and issued stern warnings to stop writing or face the consequences.”

Cuban journalists still at liberty are now exercising caution. “They are really watching carefully their next moves because they don’t know if they will be the next to be targeted, or to be interrogated or to be harassed, or even to be arrested,” says CPJ’s Carlos Lauria.

Not surprisingly, the crackdown received little coverage in Cuba’s state-controlled press. The March 19 edition of Granma, the Cuban Communist party daily newspaper, contained a statement linking the detainees to U.S.-sponsored “conspiratorial activities.” Fidel Castro defended his actions in a four-hour speech broadcast on Cuban television on April 25.

“The whole philosophy here is that the media is an instrument to strengthen and empower and perpetuate the revolution and its ideals,” says CNN’s Lucia Newman.

In the past, the Cuban government has also accused foreign journalists of spreading lies and threatened to close foreign news bureaus. So far it has not targeted the foreign press. “We are back to the Cold War days again,” says Newman. “I don’t know how much tolerance they will continue to have for our stories.”

“Every time the opposition seems to be growing and growing and gaining more strength, its wings are cut,” she says. “But it’s also true that every time they regroup and come back, they come back bigger than they were before.”

Two years ago, Raul Rivero wrote a prescient opinion piece that was published in La Nacion,  a newspaper in Argentina. The New York Times republished the piece on April 22. Here is an excerpt:

“The letter of the law concerning the protection of national independence and the economy in Cuba allows the authorities in my country to sentence me to prison because the only sovereign act I have performed since I gained the use of my reason is writing without being dictated to.

“And so, an order written in the perishable ink of political trickery and wrapped in a clumsy maneuver to make it seem that we, a small group of journalists, were working in Cuba as allies of drug traffickers and procurers and salaried mercenaries of the United States, yields only a cocktail of repugnance in me.

“The years in prison that the law promises with so much generosity must be viewed with a consternation that goes beyond the fear of confinence and punishment. It means presenting the Cuban nation as an encysted tribe in the Caribbean, closed off from information and the discussion of ideas, remote from evolution and change.

“No one can make me feel like a criminal, or an enemy agent, or someone who does not love his country, or make me believe any of the other absurd accusations the government uses to degrade and humiliate. I am only a man who writes. And writes in the country where he was born, and where his great-grandparents were born.”