Fidel stole my students

Lafitte Fernández. El Diario de Hoy. El Salvador, May 13, 2003.

Lafitte Fernández, editor of El Diario de Hoy, in San Salvador, El Salvador,  was getting ready to travel to Cuba to conduct a workshop for approximately  20 independent journalists, after having been asked to do so by an  international journalists' organization. Shortly before he was to leave, he  received an e-mail that read: "Fidel jailed all your students."

This is the story about a group of men whose only crime was to believe that  they could write about the regime in Cuba.

"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 techinques.

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 inmense 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.  

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