May 6, 1999
"Freedom of the press is a means to obtain civil and political liberty, since, while educating the masses by tearing the dense veil of ignorance, it makes people know their rights so they can demand them."
Ignacio Agramonte y Loynaz
By Mario J. Viera, Cuba Verdad Agency
HAVANA, May - For years now, our government has declared itself the ardent defender of our political traditions, those engendered in the minds of our founding fathers since those hard times when Cubans conquered their identity as a nation fighting in the bushes with machetes. The congress of official representatives in our culture was decided as well by defending our traditions. But is this presumption really being fulfilled?
The Cuban ideal was forged by degrees, taking the vein offered by the French encyclopedists, the founding fathers of the United States, and the ever pursued and seldom attained longing of the 1798 French triad: liberty, equality and fraternity.
The search for freedom as an expression of the fulfillment of individual potential, in antithetical relationship with the exaggerated centralism of monarchic and colonial despotism, was always the quid divinum of 19th century Cuban thinkers, among them, in their own haughty splendor, father Félix Varela and poet José Martí.
And in that libertarian enthusiasm, founded on the arrogant condition of preserving that individualism considered by Ignacio Agramonte as essential for society, and which is based on the full dignity of the human person, the essential weapon was, more than cavalry sabers, the word, a resonant and graphic sheath to sincere thought and opinion. Cuban political tradition revolves around principles of freedom of expression and press, and is alien to self-censorship and timid silence.
Varela, priest and philosopher, became a journalist; as did Martí, whose main body of written work consists of chronicles and articles edited for various newspapers of the continent and for the one he founded, called Patria.
Journalism, viewed as the right to exercise free thought to which, according to Agramonte, "belong freedom of examination, of doubt, of opinion, as phases and directions of such," composed the firm foundation of our political traditions. To cut off the right to practice independent journalism would be denying, nullifying the foundation of our political and civil traditions.
Is our government wrong when it limits the right of press freedom to the mere exercise of fawning journalism and prohibits with penal sanctions any peacefully expressed, yet unfavorable, written opinion? This goes against all our history and against man's freedom. To renounce freedom of journalistic expression out of fear of draconian court law is to renounce one's own freedom, which is, as Rousseau said, "to renounce man's quality, humanity's rights, even its duties."
No law is ever fair, neither is there any reason to justify it, when it suppresses any of man's sacred liberties. To suppress that innate right of expressing one's own opinion is to go against all of humankind's granted or natural liberties. That's how it was understood by José Martí, who wrote: "With liberties, as with privileges, it follows that together they triumph or fail, and one cannot pursue or injure one without harming or benefiting the whole." Or, returning to Rousseau, we might conclude: "To deprive (man's will) from all liberties, is to deprive his actions of all morality."
And the essence of our traditions, the path they follow, is not one of irritating intransigence, but that Martían concept of homeland as justice and respect for all opinions. One shall not fear voiced or printed opinion. Noble or ignoble ideas can only be defeated by higher ideas, not by locks or prisons. To repress others for their opinions is the oldest way of confessing one's inability to defend one's own.
When those of us, who decided to carry out in Cuba an alternative journalism to the official media, have continued to perform our work as public informers in spite of the threats contained in Law 88, we do not do it for the masochist pleasure of belonging to a new martyrdom, or for the arrogant stand of a suicidal provocation. We do so because we believe the intolerance of not relinquishing our natural right of thought, of opinion, of examining or doubting, is just. And because we cannot renounce the right to tread the paths of our traditions. Those which compose the meaning of Cubanism.
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