MEDIA-CUBA: Pulling Out of Crisis Amidst Conflicting Pressures

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Mar 17 1999 (IPS) - Participants in the seventh congress of Cuba’s Union of Reporters (UPEC) agreed this week that the most pressing concern of journalists in this Caribbean island nation was access to information.

The end of the congress coincided with the reappearance Wednesday of the popular daily ‘Juventud Rebelde’.

The existence of issues considered off-limit or taboo by Cuba’s state-monopolised press has been systematically raised by reporters here, who would like to exercise a journalism open to the wide range of problems faced by Cuban society.

Above and beyond the serious material shortages, reporters are concerned about how to provide a product that responds to the interests of society, while remaining faithful to the tenets of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

“There is no self-censorship, but rather responsibility,” said TV reporter Rolando Napoles during one of the breaks in the UPEC congress which drew 400 delegates representing the body’s 2,800 members from Saturday through the early hours of Wednesday morning.

But Napoles added that on more than one occasion he himself had seen his work “underestimated” by officials who took it upon themselves to “administer, censor or restrict information.”

Nelson Barrera, with the ‘Noticiero Nacional de Television’ (National Television Newscast) returned to the old question of state employees who shield themselves behind the question of “sensitive issues” to withhold information from the press, often to conceal their own shortcomings, in his view.

An independent press opposed to the government is not allowed in Cuba, where the state owns all communications media, and information policy is formulated and overseen by the Ideological Department of the Communist Party.

The report presented by the leaders of UPEC at the seventh congress called on reporters to avoid “apathy, conformism, superficiality and extremisms, whose opposites are hypocrisy and a smug tone.”

Considered “ideological fighters” by authorities, reporters in Cuba make an effort to reconcile compliance with their role as employees of the government press and the aim to work as professional reporters.

The reappearance of the daily ‘Juventud Rebelde’, meanwhile, brought a sort of closure to the long-running debate on the role of the press in Cuba, while ushering in new hope for a sector hit particularly hard by the economic crisis gripping the country since 1990.

Considered the best newspaper printed in Cuba in the 1980s, and nostalgically remembered by its readers, the organ of the Union of Young Communists was cut in October 1990 from 700,000 copies a day to 250,000 copies only on Sundays.

The decision, taken at the highest spheres of the government of Fidel Castro, was one of the first measures adopted during the so- called “special period in times of peace,” and affected all of the media.

Eight years later, the demand is still high for the articles written by Colombia’s Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, investigative journalistic reports, articles on literature and sections on sex education which have distinguished the Sunday paper for years.

“That newspaper has always sold like hot bread,” said Armando Perez, who works in a newspaper stand.

“When ‘Juventud Rebelde’ began to come out only once a week, and all of the press was considerably reduced, people began to arrive every Sunday at four in the morning to stand in line and wait for the paper to come out,” he said.

According to the assistant director of the newspaper, Rosa Miriam Elizarde, the daily “is on the streets again because the reasons for which its circulation was reduced have been attentuated.

“In Cuba, 19 dailies used to be printed. But there came a time when the choice was milk for the children or paper for newspapers,” Elizarde told IPS. “It was clear what had to be done, and now the situation has evidently changed.”

As a result of the loss of its main suppliers of paper, members of the now defunct east European socialist bloc, production by the print media was slashed from 28,000 tonnes a year of paper to 6,000 tonnes, according to official sources.

Of 584 publications, with a total of 85 million copies a year, only 100 survived. Television and radio broadcasting were reduced by around 35 percent each.

The crisis in the publishing sector began to turn around in 1996 as part of the incipient revival of the economy, and as several publications found means of self-financing.