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We knew Nelson Mandela's name long before he was released from the South African jail because reporters made his name known. In the United States and Europe, people prayed in synagogues and churches for the release of Natan Sharansky and Andrei Sakharov from Soviet imprisonment or exile. Would Chinese democracy activist Wei Jingsheng be free today if not for the pressure that China felt from the international press?
For most of the last 25 years, the Western free press has championed the universal rights to free speech, press, association, and religion. Reporters made heroes out of the people willing to stand up to totalitarian governments on the left or the right.
Amnesty International lists 600 ``prisoners of conscience'' currently rotting in the Cuban gulag. Pope John Paul II gave the government a list of 200 names, pleading for their release. Some were released in a government amnesty earlier this month. Nevertheless, the U.S. State Department's 1998 report on human rights lists Cuba as one of the world's most egregious violators of human rights.
Why then, with some 3,000 American reporters credentialed to cover the Pope's visit to Cuba, was there so little news from those opposed to Fidel Castro's communist paradise? They include people such as Daula Carpio Matos, Ivan Lema Romero, Jose Manuel Llera, Liliam Meneses Martinez, Iliana Peñalver, and Jose Antonio Alvarado.
Just a few miles from where the Pope addressed a throng of Cuban faithful on Jan. 23, and where hundreds of U.S. and Canadian reporters toiled to give their readers the true picture of Cuba, these people sat hungry in dingy cells or under house arrest. On a hunger strike since October, they were arrested and given up to 1 1/2 years in work camp or prison for protesting the arrest of Carpio Matos, a member of the illegal Cuban Pro-Human Rights Party.
These dissidents were sent home in the February amnesty, but even as the government released some prisoners, many more were in pretrial detention for organizing a campaign to release political prisoners.
One theory on the media's silence is that the Cuban regime has cowed the U.S. press in much the same way that it has subdued most of its 11 million people -- with fear. For years, getting permission to report in Cuba has been a coveted brass ring, visas awarded only to the reporters deemed reliable by the Cuban government. And some reporters, hoping to make return trips, purposely tailored their coverage so as not to offend anyone in government.
On my first visit to Cuba six years ago, a well-respected reporter who still reports from Cuba schooled me on what the authorities would permit and what was out of bounds: It was permitted to interview ``government-approved'' dissidents, most notably Elizardo Sanchez, a former Marxist professor who has spent eight years in jail.
Sanchez, the head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and Reconciliation, has suffered enormously. He has jackboot prints on his front door to prove it. And reporters have beaten a well-worn path to his house. Perhaps coincidentally, he is, by his own count, one of the minority of opposition figures who, like the Cuban government, also opposes the U.S. embargo on Cuba.
Despite the so-called openness of the Cuban government for the Pope's trip, it refused visas to at least 60 reporters from The Miami Herald, The St. Petersburg Times, and several European and Latin American newspapers. Many denied entry were old Cuba hands who had written unflattering reports about the deterioration of the revolution in recent years.
So, many who received the coveted tickets to Havana were Cuba novices, first-time visitors to the island with no time to peer behind the public mask of the revolution. Others, apparently in sync with the ``gains of the revolution'' and opposed to the U.S. policy on Cuba, simply choose to ignore the other side of the story.
It is not as though opposition figures in Cuba are unknown. Two phone calls before I left for Cuba got me four pages of names, addresses, and phone numbers. Time prevented me from visiting more than one, Dr. Hilda Molina, who said that American reporters rarely stop by.
Asked if my visit put her in danger, she said defiantly: ``I don't care if you are State Security, I would say the same things.'' Before that kind of courage, I find it cowardly that some news organizations simply recycle regime propaganda as news.
During his 18 years in a Chinese jail, Wei Jingsheng knew that his
international stature kept him from ``disappearing.'' ``They could have
made me vanish from the face of the Earth,'' he told The Washington Times
recently. In Cuba, the Wei Jingshengs, the Nelson Mandelas, and the Andrei
Sakharovs keep disappearing for lack of international attention.
©1998 The Washington Times
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald