Havana, July 10, 1996. (APIC).- It is obvious that, to live in Cuba nowadays, is not easy for anyone, and, of course, by this statement we are not talking about the power elite or the well-to-do leaders of its bureaucratic centralism. To be a journalist under Castroism means only one of two options: to defame yourself into submission or risk your life in rebelliousness. To be an official journalist or an independent one.
The squalid, repetitive, manipulated, poorly written, boring, and flattering official press is drowning each day more and more into dismay and apathy. It languishes, ill by schemes and routines, captive to slogans and silence. It is a wretched and clumsy echo of the power structure and it is made to obey, unconditionally, bureaucrats who don't understand it and do not respect it. Of course they have never wanted, or sought, to be respected.
Cuba was a prosperous and cultured country, which always had brilliant and feisty journalists. Men and women who dedicated their lives to serve the public from the printed pages, the radio and television programs and the news programs and film documentaries in a free environment, eager for the betterment of the country, its people, and humanity.
That is until 1959, when state totalitarianism rose, with ideological intolerance, the fatal stalinist example, the nationalization of the totality of the press, the implicit and explicit cohersion, the prohibition of the National College of Journalists, as well as, the elimination of the Press Association..... Yes, it was then that Jose Marti, the standart bearer of the free press, was forgotten, and they tried to imitate an obsolete, tied up and foreign press, which arrived to us from Moscow and was not even read in Russia.
During these 35 years of shadows, the Cuban official press has vegetated without enthusiasm, creativity, professional rigors, objectivity... Perhaps what is the worst virus which afflicts it: without readership, listeners, or television audience. Like the opposition leader Vladimir Roca was telling me the other day, the people buy the newspapers, when they find them, for other uses and not for reading. In the best of cases, to wrap up their trash.
Why doesn't the boring official press have the least credibility or a minimum of public interest? Its mortal sin has been to condone everything, it has been an accomplice to everything, it has not detected any errors, mistakes or failures in anything which has come down from the power elite. It has not seen the political, social or economic crisis. It hasn't even fought, not even shyly, the spread of chaos under the aegis of the bureaucratic centralism. It has ignored the misery, the lack of rights, the hopelessness of an entire people. It has created an artificial golden world, shamefully sucking up to those above and throwing insults to those below.
Today, the twilight of the official press is evident and irreversible. The official Journalists Union in Cuba (UPEC), invariably supports the government and the directives of the press organisms against the news professionals. It has created a spider's web of evaluations, precepts and directives, censure and tribunals to blackmail journalists and to suppress, before it is uttered, any discordant idea, any creative impulse, any emergence of rebelliousness.
Fortunately, not everything is lost. Like a brilliant American thinker once said: "the night is never as dark as when it is just about to be dawn". After the twilight of the trained and fearful press there emerges the new dawn of the independent press, determined to pick up the batton for the free press which the people have always demanded. It still has not taken roots in the strong, brave and secure vanguard which we hope to. But it is beginning to give hopeful signs of life and strength, of dignity and effectiveness. Today, the truths about Cuba, the tabu and censured reality of the captive island, which were never covered by the official pres, and which the foreign correspondents assigned to Havana, almost never dare to cover, is being brought to the country and to the world by the cuban indepenent press.
The twilight of the official press, flattering and triunfalist, is now a fact. The dawn of the new independent press cannot be hidden. It will be the Cuban press in the near future.
Translated for CubaNet by Lourdes Arriete