By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Aug 18 1997 (IPS)

The Cuban government is maintaining its pressure on the at least five small underground press agencies which send information and news abroad.

The weekly ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the publication of the Union of Young Communists and the second widely read newspaper in Cuba, reported over the weekend that the sector of opposition journalists working in Cuba earned some 75,000 dollars a month from the United States.

Analyst Mario Jorge Munoz cited U.S. media reports according to which independent Cuban journalists who distributed anti- government propaganda received money to “withstand” the economic crisis gripping the country since 1990.

Local authorities here say the internal anti-government opposition, including reporters, exists thanks to U.S. financial support, and that dissidents are only in it for the money and the possibility of fattening their “risk dossiers” in the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and being accepted as U.S. residents.

‘Juventud Rebelde’ reported that Cuban-American journalist Yndamiro Restano, who heads the Miami-based Union of Reporters without Censorship, was accused by his colleagues in Cuba of holding on to prize money granted them a year ago.

Most of those working with the at least five underground press agencies previously held jobs in government media organs.

One example is Raul Rivero, the director of a small clandestine group called Cuba Press, which sends news and commentaries on Cuba abroad. After being arrested last week and held for four days by state security bodies, Rivero was released free of charges – but with a warning to leave the country, he said.

Previously a correspondent in Moscow and editor of the government ‘Prensa Latina’ agency, Rivero is the most well-known dissident reporter within Cuba. He also writes for ‘El Nuevo Herald’, the Spanish-language supplement of the U.S. ‘Miami Herald’.

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin condemned Rivero’s arrest as a human rights violation, and said the reporter was only one of 85 Cuban dissidents arrested over the past four months, including the four members of the Group of Internal Dissidence accused of “enemy propaganda.”

Chapter 63 of the Cuban constitution – which dates back to 1974 – stipulates that none of the liberties enjoyed by citizens can be exercised against the constitution, the existence of the socialist state or the building of socialism and communism. That includes any kind of activity against Cuba’s single-party political system – officially termed “participative democracy” – and the historical leadership of the 1959 revolution.

The international organisation ‘Reporters without Frontiers’ said early this month that 12 independent journalists in Cuba had received threats this year, 10 were attacked, and 13 detained by state security. But no ‘disappearances’ or murders of reporters critical of the government have ever been reported here.

In that sense, Cuba constrasts sharply with other Latin American countries, such as Mexico, which with 90 murdered journalists in 27 years heads the Latin American Federation of Journalists’s list of dangerous places for reporters.

In Cuba, media organs belong to the state, with some toeing the official line more closely than others. The only exception is a number of religious publications which have a very restricted circulation.

Independent journalists do not publish or broadcast internally. They distribute mimeographed sheets of information to foreign press agencies accredited in Cuba. The small independent agencies also have close contact with radio stations like ‘Radio Marti’, which broadcasts to Cuba from the United States.

According to the president of Cuba’s Reporters Union (UPEC), Tubal Paez, the official Cuban press is one of “the most free and independent in the world,” in contrast to “that which is clandestinely organised by the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana.” UPEC groups 3,000 reporters, editors and photo- journalists, who follow the norms laid out by the governing Communist Party’s information policy.

Excerpt: