Télex de Cuba (HORS COLLECTION) (French Edition)

Although Castro may or may not have visited Rachel K. Mirrors and reflections come up a couple times. Documenting life as it happened seemed like a way of not experiencing it. As if posing for photographs, or focusing on what to save and call a souvenir, made the present instantly the past. Or did it mean seeing in present time something that was evidence the present had taken place, like the photos and souvenirs that Stevie collected to put in her scrapbook?

Maybe it meant you could experience something and see it as a memory at one and the same time. But whether or not you actually committed a crime, moving to another country meant getting away from all the people who had decided what kind of person you were and how you were supposed to live your life. In Kim ponders the new arrivals which include Americans for the Nicaro plant — the American nickel production. These include Everly and her family. In other words they all act more or less like ex-pats in many colonial type places.

Farrell in the post-colonial atmosphere and the status conscious characters. Forster or several other books about the Raj in India. Of course there are secrets — Mr. Castro had been plotting against Batista and wanted to get ahold of Prio. Most of what Kushner uses about Castro is true but she seems neither sympathetic nor opposed. He is in jail and just starting to organize for violent protests about this time. Maziere can see the possibilities. He was raised by Mr. Interesting character for a book with the theme of identity. That anything unseemly could be made tolerable if you told yourself it was a special thing, an exclusive thing.

Like caviar, he said. Castro warned the U. Reviews — NY Times When you want to get rid of someone, you don't attack them for what they say or write but on the basis of their personal behaviour. If the journalist's an alcoholic, you can set up and film a drunken party and then use it against them later. In the s, one journalist was expelled for supposed sexual involvement with under-age teenagers. The authorities had known for years he indulged now and again, so they saved up the knowledge until he wrote something that really annoyed them.

The system was wonderfully described in the French film 'Dossier I was burgled four times at home for no apparent political reason. After the remarks from "Cuban colleagues," foreign journalists get "cautions," usually from the CPI spokesperson.

See a Problem?

Rousseau was sharply called to account in late , a few months after arriving in Cuba, for writing a story about an egg shortage in Havana headed "Cuban chickens don't obey the government's Five-Year Plan" see story in Appendix. He implied they were stressed out by the rigours of the Special Economic Period. Birukoff was reprimanded for writing about the black market and about the beach resort of Cayo Largo the government was building for foreign tourists and that only Cubans employed there could go to.

Pointing that out drew a rebuke, but without a threat or warning. Birukoff's expulsion in June , after 11 months in the country, was based on another article. It was a scoop, involving long and difficult investigation, about the existence of a Cuban body called Interconsul, which facilitated marriages for money between foreigners and Cubans who wanted to leave the island, with passports arranged as well.

You are being expelled. You have three hours to leave the country.

An English-language journalist posted in Cuba for four years in the mids said he was summoned about every three months by Minrex to go through what he had written. I was criticised for example for using the term 'communist country' in a negative way. Then I decided to listen very carefully to their argument to try to understand why they were offended by one thing rather than another.

It was a very interesting exercise deciphering their vision of the world. An English-speaking colleague was ordered to "justify every word" of his economic reporting in the s, when Cuba was trying to attract and then keep foreign investors in joint ventures where the Cuban government retained a 51 per cent interest. The attitude to resident foreign journalists only really got threatening when articles began appearing about the taboo subjects of dissident activity and, most of all, anything to do with the person of Castro himself.

For the first time, a political dissident had spoken to them allowing his own name to be quoted. The dissident, Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz, confirmed in the name of his organisation the Cuban Human Rights and National Reconciliation Commission the existence of labour camps and gave an estimate of how many political prisoners there were in Cuba, which was another first see story in Appendix.

He asked me to call in colleagues from two other news agencies, but one of them, from the Spanish news agency EFE, was out of the country on holiday. As soon as his report of this came out, Lorthiois was called to Minrex, where he was told he was being expelled for giving a platform to "anti-social bandits" and "working with enemies of the Revolution.

His successor, Rosenthal, was summoned three times in five years, always about dissidents, who became bolder while he was there. I think it was part of their method, to show they were there and reading what you wrote. They told me they were going to do it and I was there. They were arrested just as they were about to lay the wreath. They didn't question the facts but said I'd given too much importance to dissident activity.

I said that wasn't true and that the AFP news file showed plenty of other subjects were reported on. Rosenthal was summoned against about the dissidents, this time concerning Ricardo Bofill who founded the Cuban Human Rights Committee in prison in , but he was not expelled. They are still reproached and sometimes threatened. Sanclemente said he was asked not to report on any dissident protests before the Ibero-American summit.

But journalists are rarely expelled these days, because simple non-renewal of visas is more effective and draws less attention and because the main dissidents have, since the summit, been more and more frequently sought out by visiting ministers and prime ministers and the foreign press cannot decently not report that. What can you say about him and how do you say it? He managed to write, without being criticised, an article called "Castronomia," describing the daily food problems of Cubans, based on the cooking recipes Castro liked to recommend in times of shortages.

Agency journalists usually avoid wording, except for quotes, that could be described as value-judgments, but newspaper journalists have more latitude. Languepin was severely reprimanded for writing "the ageing caudillo" in one of his economic articles. The health of the Maximum Leader, who will turn 77 in August this year, is one of the most dangerous topics to deal with and can result in a summons by Castro himself.

Even though he sometimes completely drops out of sight for lengthy periods, it is considered bad taste to speculate why. Agency journalists learned this to their cost after the Miami paper Nuevo Herald quoted an alleged doctor on 21 July as saying Castro had been operated on in October for a serious brain condition, hypertensive encephalopathy.

The Havana correspondents of Reuters and AFP investigated and found that around the time of the supposed operation, Castro had had an official meeting with a Vatican envoy. The government strongly denied the story and the journalists reported the denial, adding the result of their own investigations. However,when he opened the Cuban parliament on 22 July, Castro launched a fierce attack on the foreign media, accusing them of "denigrating socialism, demoralising the Revolution and fighting against it with lies and tricks of all kinds.

Rousseau of AFP reported this episode, quoting Castro's words and adding: He and his colleagues from Reuters and EFE were summoned by Castro to his office around midnight and Rousseau was made to justify his story word for word until 5 in the morning. The most serious charge, in Castro's eyes, was use of the word "however," which the Cuban leader said "revived in an insidious and deliberate way the wildly false rumours" about his health.

The Nuevo Herald itself later knocked down the operation story and reported that the doctor was not a doctor after all. At one point, Rousseau said, Castro "exploded" and shouted "Who do you think we are? You think we're idiots! The political climate in Cuba became much tenser at the end of and even more the following year, in the run-up to the Ibero-American summit in November, and there was a crackdown on dissidents, prostitutes and journalists.

Law 88 quickly nicknamed The Gag Law came into force in February , targeting anyone who "collaborated in any way with foreign radio or TV broadcasts, magazines or other media" or "supplied information" considered likely to serve US interests and providing for imprisonment for up to 20 years, confiscation of all personal property and fines of up to , pesos about 4, euros.

Attacks on the foreign media grew increasingly fierce. The official daily Granma said on 4 March that "some resident foreign journalists and some foreign agencies were deliberately spreading news of all the plots, insults and dirty tricks launched by paid agents" of US imperialism. They were accused of "using their profession in a disgraceful way to discredit Cuba These stepped-up attacks were accompanied by more visible surveillance and clear ostracism.

After the Cuban press attacked us by name, people we used to socialise with ignored us and colleagues and diplomats would say 'oh, so you're still here! Paranoia grew and one day the brakes suspiciously failed twice on a fairly new Peugeot car Rousseau had. The couple finally left in July after Rousseau got another job in France. A few days before he left, the head of the CPI told a French diplomat that the journalist had become "an undesirable. They had returned to the island once before the book was published. The Castro's regime's control of information is nothing new.

It dates right from the start of the Cuban Revolution. Jean Huteau, AFP 's first-ever resident correspondent, who opened the agency's Havana bureau in July , describes today, with the same indignation he had at the time, how his "cables" stories were altered in transmission, which in those days was quite rare around the world.

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Was Castro following suit? In the early s, telex messages from Cuba were sent by the American firm Western Union, which was soon nationalised by the new regime. With no direct lines, telexes to Paris were sent from Havana to New York and then sent on. I wrote there were about , there. That evening, a Mexican radio station I could still pick up in Havana reported that "according to AFP , there were about a million demonstrators. Under my by-line, the figure was given as one million. When I wrote "the anti-Castro invaders of the Bay of Pigs," it would get changed to "the mercenaries" of the Bay of Pigs.

Huteau tried to sort out the situation "with the help of a friend of a friend" of one of the Western Union woman teletype operators, "who admitted to me there were censors there and that my cables were read by the only person who knew French, a woman teacher who didn't work full-time and came by only when she could. When the teacher-censor wasn't there, my copy wouldn't be sent. Sometimes there were gaps of between six and 10 hours. Paris said I was being beaten on stories by the other agencies and I thought it was due to technical problems.

I understood everything after talking to the operator, who I knew might lose her job if I involved her in any complaint. I protested about the delays to the foreign ministry press department, where I had the following exchange:. What do you mean? You know there's no censorship here. But I know there is. How do you know that?

Bring them here and if it's true we'll do something about it. Huteau was anxious not to expose his source. There was no censor to go out and find for those and there would be no more delays. After a month, I sent to head office in Paris, by diplomatic bag, copies of all the stories I'd filed over the previous four weeks. They compared them word for word with the version they'd received from Western Union, assembled the results into a makeshift book and sent it to me.

For example, Blas Roca, secretary of the old Cuban Communist Party and father of dissident Vladimiro Roca, had made a speech saying in effect that 'an effort needs to be made because this revolution is going so fast that people's minds can't keep up with it.

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But also astonished that my colleagues could think for a minute I'd written stuff like that. Huteau then decided to got right to the top and complain to Castro himself, who at the time was his own spokesman. About 20 high-level visiting journalists turned up and Castro was in great form and answered all the questions. I and my colleague from Reuters , whose cables had also been altered, asked: Soon afterwards I got an answer through the foreign ministry, which said in effect that 'yes, corrections have been made and we apologise. But the telex operators are revolutionaries who are outraged at what the capitalist press is writing and they alter it.

You have to understand them. To send out his scoops, including the arrival 30 kms from Havana of supposed "agricultural engineers" who were in fact Soviet soldiers come to set up rocket bases, Huteau from then on used human carrier-pigeons - travellers, often diplomats, who would take out and then post or deliver his stories to the AFP New York office. Minrex later issued new press cards that were valid only for Havana. If you wanted to go outside the city, you had to have special permission.

News agencies, like other media outlets, usually give few instructions to correspondents before going to Havana. They recommend, as they would before going to any other place, that they work as best they can, respecting the rules of the profession and the extra rigour required of all agency journalists, sometimes stressing the need to be careful. Above all, since agency journalists are more vulnerable than other media in Cuba, they urge them to avoid "provocations" that might lead to quick expulsion.

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Most of the journalists interviewed said they arrived in Cuba determined to operate there as they would anywhere else, without censoring themselves and working openly despite the police surveillance they all knew they were subject to. But the moment often arrived when, as Sanclemente puts it, it gets hard to keep your head amid all the critical remarks, odd visits, clear warnings and press conferences with foreign journalists that are broadcast on state TV. The atmosphere becomes unbearable when the regime's attacks increase to the point that you're publicly named.

Rousseau says such pressure confronts the foreign journalist "with two choices, neither of them really satisfactory. Either he pipes down and doesn't behave any more as a journalist should, opening him to criticism from his editors, or else he tries to continue working normally and everything he writes will be attacked by the authorities as insulting, twisted and aggressive. Rousseau regrets the lack of proper "crisis management" in the media when the situation becomes difficult - involving a review of past experiences, psychological support and firm backing from editors - though this is done to some extent by the English-speaking media.

Rosenthal sees the latitude foreign journalists have in Cuba as "like a football pitch whose size is always changing. Sometimes it shrinks and sometimes it expands. So you have to listen carefully to understand what the tricky subjects of the moment are. I've written some things about sensitive topics when I've witnessed events with my own eyes or when I feel very sure of the facts.

I took pictures of it and wrote that an Iraqi tanker was lying off Cuba, when that was supposed to be forbidden.

Cuba Sailing

Cuban officials swore it wasn't true. So I showed them my photos. If you can prove what you've written about, they'll take it on the chin and won't go further, even though they'll scold you for not having a "friendly attitude. Rousseau and Cumerlato beg to differ. You can criticise that approach because it was the source of our problems. But we maintain that if that attitude was taken by more of the resident foreign journalists, it could be better sustained in general.

A European correspondent based in another Latin American country who often has to report from Cuba says "all journalists censor themselves in Cuba," whether or not they admit it or whether they live there or just visit and are thus blackmailed about getting an entry visa. Whether they were expelled, permanently or temporarily stripped of visas, allowed back into the country or ended their posting at the normal time, all the journalists spoken to stressed one point. That what they experienced in Cuba, risking at worst expulsion, pales before what ordinary Cubans have had to put up with every day for more than 40 years, effectively gagged, living in fear and in danger of losing their job or being thrown in prison.

One European journalist did not want to say anything at all because of a personal relationship with a Cuban official. We did not interview foreign journalists currently working in Cuba, to avoid making their situation difficult. Cuban officials confirmed the arrests but said they were "not human rights people" and that their detention, which was unexplained, was not related to human rights. He said he was a founder member of the Committee and had already spent six years in prison. He was released last December The Committee's offices were raided on August 28, the day after Bofill, the Committee's president, fled to the French embassy, he said, and police had seized copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a duplicating machine, ink, a stock of paper and two boxes of the Committee's archives.

Cuban officials refused immediate comment on the confiscations. Sanchez said the Committee said there were about 1, political prisoners in Cuba.

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If those being held for conscientious objection, religious reasons or for refusing to do military service in Angola were included as well, the figure would rise to 15,, he said. Cuban Church sources told AFP there were 78 "long-term" political prisoners those jailed since before but said they could not be sure who were "political" detainees or not after that date.

The Cuban Church, working with US Catholic officials and various international organisations, was behind the release and departure for the US on September 15 of 68 political prisoners and 43 of their relatives.