So far, the government of Fidel Castro has granted authorization only to CNN, one of 10 news outlets the White House approved for Cuba bureaus this week.
A Havana spokeswoman said her government will open its doors to journalists who ``respect us and objectively reproduce the image of Cuba.''
She did not say whether her government is willing to do the same.
As Cuba demands respect from the American press, it intensifies a campaign to crush its own independent journalists. If ever it were clear what the Castro government thinks of journalism, it is right now.
Take no clues from the Cuban government's delay in granting official authorization to other American news outlets. Whether permission comes in a day or in a year is not significant. It will come. The irony is that the Cuban government will grant foreigners the same permission it denies its own home-grown journalists.
To understand Cuba's posture toward independent journalism one must venture no further than the Havana home of Raul Rivero.
He is the director of an independent news agency called CubaPress. The 52-year-old poet is a freelance correspondent and a regular contributor to news outlets in the United States, such as El Nuevo Herald.
Several dozen government agents encircled his home Tuesday night, shouting ``traitor'' and other insults.
The night before, six other mob protests were staged outside the homes of two CubaPress reporters, Tania Quintero and Ana Luisa Lopez Baeza, HavanaPress director Joaquin Torres, and independent journalists Mercedes Moreno, Jorge Oliveira and Omar Rodriguez. Other writers have been harassed, ousted from their homes and detained.
These were government-sponsored ``actos de repudio,'' repudiation rallies, not the impromptu protests of the proletariat, as Cuba would have us believe. The mobs are Castro's Rapid Response Brigades, chilling reminders of outbursts against dissidents and human rights advocates.
Because such actos have turned violent, the targeted reporters now fear for their lives.
Listen to Raul Rivero's words on Miami radio this week:
``If anything should happen to me, my family or any of us [journalists], I wish to place the responsibility on the top figures in the government and the Interior Ministry.''
The mob aggressions prompted a cry for solidarity from three famous writers. In a statement issued in Paris, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Cuban writers Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Carlos Franqui denounced the attacks on Cuba's press and issued a plea for help to the democratic governments of Europe and America.
The official Cuban press, on the other hand, slammed the independent writers. On Wednesday, the Cuban Communist Party newspaper, Granma, published a statement from the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists denouncing the journalists as ``modern-day annexationists'' who would ``sell the fatherland'' for dollars.
Meanwhile, the journalists simply want to do what free journalists do.
The next time you wonder why the Castro government appears in no great hurry to approve Havana bureaus for other U.S. news agencies, remember the plight of the independent journalists. There's your answer -- why would the government want aggressive American reporters and news crews crawling around Havana, documenting brigade attacks?
Copyright © 1997 The Miami Herald