“I like it... I like it...! I love the idea!” I said to myself as I read an e-mail from an old friend and seasoned journalist. An international journalists’ organization was asking me to travel to Cuba to run a teaching session for about 20 independent journalists.

They all practice journalism free from the dictates of the Castro government.

The idea seduced me, but I kept it quiet for a few days. I had to inquire about the safety of teaching in Cuba without Fidel taking umbrage.

When I finally opened my mouth, the least my friends called me was “crazy.”

“How can you even think of it,” said one of them. “You may be an idealist, but you could never teach free journalism under Fidel’s beard.”

The more sedate ones used the word “deranged.”

“No, no, I replied. Castro has allowed some space to the independent journalists. They are tolerated. They are even allowed to publish on a web site. I have an idea things are changing in Cuba,” I said.

Someone very close asked me “Why do you insist in going to Cuba? What happens if Fidel puts you in prison? By the time we raise an international outcry, you could spend a year in a Cuban jail!”

But I tend to be persistent when a challenge makes my eyes sparkle. At times, I remember my grandmother used to say I’m more stubborn than a whole mule train. I was convinced I would be all right.

A few days later, another e-mail message startled me: Fidel Castro had jailed my would-be students. Not one. Not two, nor three. He had jailed them all!

The students I never met were destroyed by a gangrene caused by all-encompassing power.

After summary trials and flash verdicts, most of them received stiff sentences when no Cuban criminal lawyer wanted to defend them.

The one that fared best got 14 years in prison for writing brief stories that bear witness to the complaints of parents who are not allowed to celebrate their daughters’ 15th birthday because it is a “bourgeois” activity.

Now, all that I have left of those journalists are some innocuous e-mails.

My frustrated trip would not have been the first I made to Cuba. More than 10 years ago I went in, legally, with the addresses of some human rights activists written on my socks.

In Cuba, I have seen the unthinkable: a family fattening a pig in the bathtub of their old house so they could feast on it at Christmas; or carefully navigating inside a private home among a dozen chickens, because Fidel decided to give three to each member of a family so they could eat chicken.

I still remember how “Chino” yelled at me the day one of his chickens became entangled in my shoes: “Hey, walk carefully; you are going to screw me out of my chicken soup.”

I also saw a three-story building collapse due to age in Havana, with all its occupants still inside. Police came, closed access to the block, and took out the dead, safe from the scrutiny of the press.

I still have friends there, amusing people, like most Cubans.

I penetrated the nether world of Cuban prostitutes, and I was a guest at a mass wedding in the Mexican embassy of more than 80 Cuban men and women who only wanted their new husbands and wives to get them out of there.

That afternoon I saw beautiful women marrying 80-year-old Mexicans, and handsome twenty-somethings marrying women of 65, whom they have possibly already dumped in some Mexican city, because they only wanted a way out of Fidel’s domains.

But this time, I wanted to find myself face to face with a group of men whom I consider true “martyrs” of journalism, even though in Cuba they are treated as “counterrevolutionary rats.”

The first Cuban journalist I met was Pepe, back in the 70s. I was in Mexico on a U.N. fellowship. When I arrived, I was told Pepe, a journalist with the official government news agency, Prensa Latina, was to be my roommate.

He habitually refused to talk about Cuba, but I didn’t need to hear him talk to understand what was happening there. Every time we received our fellowship stipend, Pepe ran off to buy blue jeans. He confided that he could make some money selling them back home.

The man bought so many pairs of jeans one fine day I had to put a stop to it; we could not get around the room by then.

I know little about the journalists I would have met in Cuba. In the list I was given, the only name that stood out was that of Raúl Rivero, a poet and journalist who, until he was locked up, daringly exposed human rights violations in his country.

When I inquired about the remaining journalists, I was told they came from other professions. Some are accountants, some are engineers, all occupations foreign to journalism.

One of them told me how he introduced Mijail Bárzaga Lugo, his neighbor, to independent journalism. Mijail got by breeding pigeons. One day, he showed up with a school notebook, a pencil, and “a tremendous desire to learn.” He asked to be taught about journalism. He started learning, writing in long hand at night until he could recognize some basic techniques.

Now Mijail is detained behind the tall walls of Villa Marista, the headquarters of the Department of State Security.

Only the brave try to do free journalism in Cuba. One does not need to have a deep understanding of history to understand that journalists are the first victims of dictators.

I know Castro’s apologists will say all efforts to teach the independent journalists in Cuba are part of a CIA plan to destabilize Fidel. But the desire to teach independent journalists is born out of men and organizations with an immense libertarian calling.

The problem is that, at some point, they believed (as I did) that Fidel Castro was disposed to allow at least a very small dose of dissent and criticism of his regime, lest it became fossilized before the eyes of the civilized world.

The truth is we were wrong.

All the time it appeared he was allowing them some small spaces, he was infiltrating agents of the Department of State Security into their ranks.

One of them, who also would have been my student, is Manuel David Orrio.

Manuel, State Security now tells us, was code-named agent Miguel, and infiltrated the independent journalists in 1992. He came in as a 38-year-old economist who wanted to write the truth about what was happening in Cuba.

His colleagues helped him. They taught him the rudimentary journalism they know, because in Cuba there are no real newspapers, only official organs of the government.

It was Manuel who declared himself an agent of the Department of State Security at the trials, and accused the journalists of receiving materials and “technical means” for “subversion.”

In other words, to write an article about what really happens in Cuba and e-mail it out is to slander the Cuban revolution and is punishable with 15 to 20 years in prison.

The only thing required of me was to travel to Cuba to teach these prisoners of conscience how journalism is done in a modern country. None of these independent journalists are familiar with a newspaper other than the rubbish cranked out by Fidel’s men.

Only one man preceded me, a good man who for a long time taught ethics to many journalists in Central America. He gathered them in Havana and talked for several hours about the need to keep fact and opinion separate, and told them about the ethics of journalism.

A short time later, they were all behind bars.

Manuel, or Miguel, or whatever his name is, had denounced them.

Their crime: writing. The offense: using words against the regime. The material evidence: sending short articles abroad. Their gravest offense: receiving up to $100 a month in payment for their work.

Sample article, published March 6.
Omar Rodríguez Saludes, 37, was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

By Omar Rodríguez Saludes, Nueva Prensa.
Havana, March 6.
Two American congressmen, Florida democrat Jim Davis, and Arizona republican Jim Kolbe, met with several Cuban government opponents March 2 in Havana. They also visited Elsa Morejón, the wife of prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Elías Biscet, at her home.
Morejón said the congressmen expressed concern for the state of human rights in Cuba, and asked questions about recent Cuban purchases of U. S. food and medicines, and about the public health system on the island.
The congressmen also met with opponents Vladimiro Roca, Héctor Palacios, Osvaldo Alfonso, and Oswaldo Payá.

Independent journalists, agency affiliation, and sentence

1. Víctor Rolando Arroyo, UPECI / 26 years
2. Pedro Argüelles Morán, CAPI / 20 years
3. Mijail Bárzaga Lugo, freelance / 15 years
4. Carmelo Díaz Fernández, APSIC / 15 years
5. Oscar Espinosa Chepe, CubaNet / 20 years
6. Adolfo Fernández Saínz, Agencia Patria / 15 years
7. Miguel Galbán Gutiérrez, Havana Press / 26 years
8. Julio César Gálvez, freelance / 15 years
9. Edel José García, freelance / 15 years
10. Roberto García Cabrejas, ICD Press / house arrest
11. Jorge Luis García Paneque, Agencia Libertad / 24 years
12. Ricardo González Alfonso, correspondent in Cuba for RSF (Reporters without Borders) / 20 years
13. Luis González Pentón / 20 years
14. Alejandro González Raga, freelance / 14 years
15. Normando Hernández, CPIC / 25 years
16. Juan Carlos Herrera, freelance / 20 years
17. José Ubaldo Izquierdo, Decoro / 16 years
18. Héctor Maseda, Decoro / 20 years
19. Mario Enrique Mayo / 20 years
20. Jorge Olivera, Havana Press / 18 years
21. Pablo Pacheco Ávila, Agencia Patria / 20 years
22. Fabio Prieto Llorente, freelance / 20 years
23. José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, ICD Press/20 years
24. Raúl Rivero Castañeda, CubaPress / 20 years
25. Omar Rodríguez Saludes, Nueva Prensa Cubana / 27 years
26. Omar Ruiz Hernández, Decoro / 18 years
27. Manuel Vázquez Portal, Decoro / 18 years

Copyright 2002 El Diario de Hoy