Distribuído por Cuba Free Press, Inc. - http://www.cubafreepress.org

La Habana, May 3, 1998, Cuba Free Press.

The Vertigo of the Blank Page. By Raul Rivero, Cuba Free Press

(Editor's Note: This essay was one of five selected by the World Association of Newspapers and distributed in English, Spanish, French and German to 15,000 publications, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of World Freedom of the Press Day on May 3d, 1998.)

HAVANA - Each time I get ready to tackle the abyss of the blank notepad to write about freedom of the press in my country, I remember, instantaneously, a phrase I read some years ago, in Prague, after democracy had been restored there. "Socialism needs the press, but does the press... need socialism?"

Since I've lived in a socialist country since I was 12, I have, of course, plenty of arguments to brandish, use, and lead to a rotund "NO" to the rhetorical question. And since I studied journalism in a socialist country, and worked for many years (too many) in the official media, I also have a plethora of failures to accentuate the baggage of irony of the question's author.

To be sure, my two decades' worth of experience working with dailies, magazines and governmental agencies in Cuba provided me with a privileged position from which to delve into the topic of the absence of freedom of the press in my motherland. But the definitive experience, the one which I now want to share with my readers, is of my work of seven years (too few) as an independent journalist, outside of State controls, just beyond the margin of the Communist Party, outside of the servitude to an ideology.

From the moment when a group of men and women started our work, pushing our frontiers, attempting to communicate (with those) abroad, reaching wide sectors of the Cuban society, giving them our vision of reality and our points of view, and started narrating with objectivity and professionalism the most important episodes in our daily lives, we moved into a realm of illegality, into the shadows, joining the ranks of non-entities, and, eventually often into prison.

In Cuba, it isn't an issue of not having freedom of the press. It is much worse. There is no press. Some forms of newspapers and magazines circulate. We hear or are informed by some type of radio or TV news broadcast, listening to the revision of life as provided by the State, which, as lord of the manor, wants to impose on the population.

Another sui generis issue of present day Cuban journalism is that we don't have the right to reply. A news medium can accuse, defame, morally destroy citizens and foreigners alike, and the individual has no means to express his views.

We, some 40 men and women who seek to explore complex topics which are experienced in our society, to air the bad and the great, simple news or flagrant injustices, have also been frequent victims of this absolute power.

The independent journalism (movement), eight groups (four in Havana), working throughout the island, has been active since Spring-1995, but already some of our correspondents have been forced into exile, and there are presently three condemned and two others serving time behind bars.

Such is the case of reporter Bernardo Arevalo Padron, the director of a small news agency working in the south-central portion of Cuba, who is serving a sentence of six years for the crime of "contempt against the Commander in Chief."

Another jailed journalist is Lorenzo Paez Nunez, Havana correspondent, condemned for the "spread of false news" to 18 months in prison.

Still another, 24 year-old Juan Carlos Recio, a reporter for Cuba Free Press Agency, working in north-central Cuba, was sentenced to one year at hard labor for not snitching on a group of political activists in his region.

A somber picture indeed, almost entering into its fifth decade in the political map of a country which, in the 19th Century, provided journalism with men the caliber of Jose Marti.

The current situation is this:

(1) A daily national paper and various national weeklies, as well as weeklies for each of the fourteen provinces, always carrying the same political slogans, geared towards "teaching" Cuban reality, with a journalism congratulatory of the regime almost to the point of adulation, written in a language empty of content.

(2) Independent journalism, without faxes, without computers, with constant telephone interruptions, under harassment and threats, but trying to open new spaces, new realms, which will serve as a base for a return to a free press, followed by the growth of a democratic society with powerful civil institutions.

We work and wait for the new millenium, and we also salute all the journalists in the free world, and those who continue to work in the Cuban official press yet still honestly believe that loyalty is not sclerosis, and those who go out daily, here and everywhere, ready to report the truth, so that the world in which we live becomes a better place for all.

Raul Rivero, Cuba Free Press.