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Cuba:
No Social Club for Journalists
Castro's Crackdown May Have Backfired
Mark Fitzgerald / Editor
& Publisher, August 11, 2003.
CHICAGO -- Nostalgia for the Cuba of hot music
borne on tropical trade winds was much in the
news recently with the deaths of Compay Segundo,
who became an international star at age 89 thanks
to the hit film Buena Vista Social Club and its
soundtrack album, and salsa legend Celia Cruz.
But the island's increasingly agitated dictator,
Fidel Castro, has been unable to bask in those
warm feelings because a tenacious campaign by
press freedom groups based in the U.S., Europe
and Latin America keeps reminding the world of
his mass imprisonment of independent journalists.
In raids March 18, Cuban secret police arrested
28 journalists who practiced their craft in defiance
of the draconian "Law 88" and other
anti-press statutes. Castro may have calculated
that world public opinion would be too distracted
by the impending Iraq war to care. Instead, furious
protests only increased after the journalists
were tried in secret and sentenced to prison terms
ranging from 14 to 27 years.
More recently, the Miami-based Inter American
Press Association (IAPA) convened a meeting of
Latin-American diplomats to urge them to increase
pressure for the journalists' release. Havana-bound
tourists in Paris received postcards titled, "Cuba:
The World's Biggest Prison for Journalists"
from Reporters Without Borders. The protest is
working. The traditionally friendly European Union,
for instance, imposed sanctions that so angered
Castro he turned a celebration of the Cuban revolution's
50th anniversary into a rally against Europe.
Castro may have felt the deepest cut, however,
from a recent action taken by the New York City-based
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). "Castro
doesn't care what the U.S. says, he doesn't care
what the EU says, but he does care what Latin
American journalists think. And what we have done
is send a Latin American journalist with a good
reputation whose reporting is indisputable,"
said Carlos Lauria, CPJ's program coordinator
for the Americas.
That journalist, Gustavo Gorriti of Peru, is
known throughout Latin America for his independence.
In the early 1990s when former President Alberto
Fujimori imposed his "self-coup" in
Peru, Gorriti was one of the first people imprisoned.
In exile in Panama, his reporting for the daily
La Prensa so unnerved the president there that
Gorriti was ordered deported.
Gorriti has quietly visited the families of several
of the imprisoned Cuban journalists, including
the wife of Raul Rivero, an IAPA board member
who was sentenced to 20 years. The prisoners are
held in dank prisons far from their homes, fed
poorly and are allowed visitors only once every
three months. Gorriti found jailers are neglecting
prisoners whose health has deteriorated, gravely
so in the case of Oscar Espinosa Chepe.
Cuba's independent journalists are not much better
off outside prison, Gorriti wrote: "While
Castro boasts that no forced disappearances, no
physical torture are inflicted on repressed opponents,
the intense, widespread harassment, pressure,
and jail conditions exerted on those opponents
undoubtedly amount to psychological torture."
Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerlad@editorandpublisher.com)
is editor at large for E&P.
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