Raúl Rivero: El Maestro

Cuban dissident writer Raúl Rivero speaks to reporters from his home in Havana on Tues., Nov. 30, 2004, moments after being released from prison. (AP Photo/José Goitia)

This extract from my forthcoming book about independent Cuban journalism is being published here on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the forced exile of Raúl Rivero from Cuba in April 2005. 

***

Master and Teacher 

In Spanish, the word maestro has two meanings: master and teacher. Raúl Rivero was both. 

He was a proven poetic master, widely considered among the best and most prolific poets of the revolutionary period.[1] He helped launch the pioneering Cuban literary magazine El Caimán Barbudo in 1966, subsequently won Cuba’s top two poetry prizes while still a young man, and then went on to publish more than ten volumes of poetry both in Cuba and abroad.[2] He also taught journalism at the University of Havana after graduating in 1969 as a member of the first generation of journalists trained in the profession following the triumph of the Revolution. 

Rivero was also a master journalist. As wryly noted by Pablo Díaz Espí, Rivero’s editor at CubaEncuentro and Diario de Cuba, his nimble, simultaneous practice of poetry and journalism, “made him bilingual” as a writer. Of course, Rivero’s skill as a journalist was quite muted during the 1970s and 1980s given the ideological muzzle he was forced to wear working as a propagandist for the official press both at home and abroad. 

However, his journalistic talent at composing brief, vivid, and aesthetically original chronicles of daily life in contemporary Cuba became apparent between 1995 and 2003, during which time he published hundreds of such day-in-the-life crónicas abroad via Cuba Press thanks to his various international editors and collaborators. Indeed, one of Rivero’s most emblematic crónicas from these years was his five-part series, “La vida cotidiana” (Daily Life), which was written in December 1998 to inject some sober reality into celebrations of the Revolution’s 40th anniversary that month.[3] 

Finally, Rivero is almost universally praised among his colleagues in the independent journalism movement on the island (García, Quintero, Escobar, Cino, Domínguez, and Olivera) for the sage reportorial instruction and compositional advice he constantly dispensed to his fellows at Cuba Press and in other independent press agencies, always while burning through an endless stream of cigarettes and small cups of café cubano. 

La Crónica 

The reportorial genre known in Spanish as la crónica is a style of literary non-fiction – long and widely used in Latin America – that chronicles the details of everyday life in brief, vivid vignettes often with an underlying message of progressive socio-political critique. Well-known and influential practitioners of the form include the 19th century writers Rubén Darío (Nicaragua) and José Martí (Cuba/New York) and, in the contemporary era, the Argentine journalists Tomás Eloy Martínez and Rodolfo Walsh. 

As opposed to straight journalism that aims to report “just the facts” of who, when, where, and why, the crónica is a distinctly literary narrative style that mixes journalistic reporting with the aesthetic, creative flair usually associated with fiction or poetry. For this reason, the crónica often overlaps with costumbrismo, a Spanish and Latin American literary tradition that reflects everyday life, customs, and mannerisms characteristic of particular eras, locales, regions, or countries. Thus, the crónica inhabits the liminal space between literature, journalism, and memoir since it often also includes first-hand testimony. 

The fiction of Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez earned the name “magical realism” based on the style of novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera given their description of the magical elements embedded in everyday life. Likewise, la crónica as practiced by Raúl Rivero in Cuba between 1995 and 2003 can be considered “quotidian surrealism” based on Rivero’s ability to humorously evoke the surreal in his provocative and decidedly politically incorrect reflections on everyday life as lived in Cuba during this very “special” period. 

The late Cuban poet Manuel Díaz Martínez perfectly captures the unique character of Rivero’s prose in the following description extracted from his prologue to Recuerdos olvidados (2003, Hiperión), a collection of el maestro’s work published when the writer was imprisoned in Cuba between 2003 and 2004: 

“Lo mejor de Rivero prosista son sus crónicas de la actualidad nacional. Revitalizan en clave moderna la gracia y la agudeza del mejor costumbrismo cubano. En ellas, con su humor tan criollo, con esa ironía suya que en ocasiones estalla en un sarcasmo espectacular, con el mismo asordinado sentimentalismo que atraviesa sus versos, Rivero nos ha dado una visión facetada y al mismo tiempo integradora, a base de viñetas que son como fotogramas de un filme interminable, de la realidad cubana. Estas crónicas nos llevan a la calle, nos acercan a la gente. Y dan testimonio del surrealismo cotidiano que se vive en la isla.” 

In the same vein, the long-exiled Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante echoes this assessment in his own prologue to Rivero's book, Orden de registro (2003, Editorial Hispano Cubana), arguing that Rivero exhibited a “remarkable originality” in the journalistic prose he produced during these years. He also notes that Rivero’s crónicas were widely read and admired on both sides of the Atlantic because they revealed a gritty and long-repressed “undiscovered country” to readers accustomed to tales of revolutionary sacrifice and achievement and because Rivero – the master journalist – practically “invented a form of narration that split the difference between fiction and the vignette of denunciation."

Search Order 

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, State Security agents raided the apartment on Peñalver that Raúl Rivero shared with his wife Blanca Reyes in Centro Habana, confiscating all his work materials and taking the famed poet and director of Cuba Press into custody. Though Reyes was used to the theatrics of Cuba’s State Security agents, while they carefully collected the all the detritus accumulated during her husband’s life as a poet and journalist as if they were forensic investigators prosecuting a murder, she thought to herself, “If they show this stuff to the world, people will just end up laughing. All journalists, whether they have degrees or not, use such things to work” (Beaulieu 2013: 343).

Rivero himself must have laughed internally as well, thinking at least briefly about his ironically prophetic poem “Search Order” (Orden de registro), which he had published just the year before in Mexico in his latest poetry collection Puente de guitarra (Guitar Bridge). The poem describes with poetic economy the absurdity of just such a raid on the home of a poet and journalist. 

“Eight policemen

are examining the texts and drawings of my daughters,

and are infiltrating themselves into my emotional networks/ 

[…] 

with a search order

a clean operation,

a full victory

for the vanguard of the proletariat.”

While the agents completed their inventory of the apartment, Rivero made a quick call to Jorge Rouillon, the foreign correspondent for the Argentine paper La Nación. Reyes quietly took the phone from Rivero and described to the reporter what was going on in a whisper. “They are raiding the house! Please tell the world!” Then she added, “They are in our living room, come quick…,” before the line was cut (Beaulieu 2013: 344).

Given that this was the third day of the roundup and that Rivero’s home was a well-known gathering spot for dissident writers and independent journalists, the street outside was crowded with neighbors and other curious onlookers. When the agents placed a handcuffed Rivero into the patrol car as if he were some kind of terrorist, a handful of angry neighbors began to shout. However, the loud denunciations that echoed in the street were aimed not at Rivero as they had been during his 1997 “acto de repudio” but at the officials themselves. “¡Abusadores!” they clamored. “¡Libertad!” (García 2013). 

For their part, Rivero’s colleagues at Cuba Press, Tania Quintero and her son Iván García remained in a tense and tenuous holding pattern for the next few months of “terror-charged days” (García 2010), awaiting a second roundup that – thankfully for them – never came. In ordering this massive crackdown during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Fidel Castro had anticipated a muted international response to Cuba’s “Black Spring.” Instead, the international condemnation was immediate, broad-based, and nearly unanimous. It even included progressive luminaries and longtime intellectual fellow-travelers of the Cuban Revolution such as José Saramago and Eduardo Galeano. 

Indeed, the European Union reacted by quickly agreeing to impose a “common position” of economic sanctions on the island. This energetic response helped keep Tania and Iván out of prison and led her to conclude, as she puts it in her memoir, that the Cuban government “had made a bad bet” in throwing the book at so many, so quickly, for so long. This, despite the fact that many of their former colleagues who had spearheaded the founding of the Cuban independent press with them during the second half of the 1990s would end up languishing in prisons far from their homes for nearly a decade. 

Rivero himself spent the remainder of 2003 and nearly all of 2004 in La Canaleta Prison in Cuba’s Ciego de Ávila province – not far from where he was born but roughly 250 miles from his wife and home in Centro Habana. However, thanks to an outpouring of international pressure and under the pretext of letting him go out of mercy due to his failing health (which was indeed severely deteriorating), he was released (but not exonerated) on November 30, 2004. He returned home a changed man. As attested to by both Reinaldo Escobar and Iván García – who visited him separately at his Centro Habana apartment before he went into exile in Spain on April 1, 2005 –, the man they once affectionately referred to as “Gordo Rivero” had become noticeably thin in prison, losing perhaps 45 pounds during the previous year-and-a-half (García 2021). 

But weight loss was the least of his problems. In fact, when Escobar asked him about the difficulties he experienced in prison, Rivero preferred not to mention the harsh living conditions, meager food, physical threats from other prisoners, or his months in solitary confinement (Machover 2009: 44-63). Instead, he responded simply, “they treated me like shit, not even a single blow,” which Escobar took to mean that the bruises he suffered were internal and would mark him for the rest of his life (Escobar 2021; 2025). 

Upon García’s visit, Rivero apologetically explained to his journalistic protégé, “We are leaving for Spain. It is a banishment, the regime is leaving me no other option,” adding with his usual acerbic wit mixed with an anticipatory nostalgia, “They parked the plane right outside La Canaleta so that I leave the country. I do hope it’s not a trip with only a one-way ticket” (García 2021).

Some months after his arrival in Spain, Rivero was interviewed by the Cuban-French researcher Jacobo Machover about his prison experiences and how it felt now to be free. Rivero could not deny the joy he felt at being individually free. At the same time, he continued to carry inside a deep sense of bitterness at having been forced to abandon his beloved patria (homeland) together with a heavy sense of obligation to those comrades-in-arms – like Ricardo González Alfonso – he left behind. 

“I do not feel culpable,” he clarified to Machover. 

“What I feel is a debt with those people. But I cannot feel guilty for my own freedom."

***

[1] Even Manuel David Orrio, the man who passed as an independent journalist for eleven years and then testified against Rivero during his April 2003 trial as agent “Miguel,” refers to him as “a distinguished journalist and poet - said to be the best of his generation […] the emblematic figure of the independent Cuban journalism movement,” in a chapter of his unpublished memoir which he shared with me in December 2024. 

[2] These are Papel del hombre (David Prize, 1969), Poesía sobre la tierra (Julián del Casal Prize, 1972), Corazón que ofrecer (1980), Cierta poesía (MINFAR Prize, 1981), Poesía pública (1983), Escribo de memoria (1987), Firmado en La Habana (1996), Estudios de la naturaleza (1997), Puente de guitarra (2002), Recuerdos olvidados (2003), Corazón sin furia (2005), Vidas y oficios (2006), and Contraseñas para la última estación (2015). Two anthologies of Rivero’s poetry have also been published. They are Herejías elegidas (1998, republished 2003) and Orden de registro (2003). 

[3] First published in Le Monde on January 2, 1999, and republished many times since, this series of quotidian vignettes describes the “other world” most Cubans experience far beyond the one inhabited by government officials, Havana-based foreign diplomats, and the tourists visiting Cuba’s growing number of hotels and beach resorts. It is a Cuban version of Jacob Riis’ photojournalistic sensation, How the Other Half Lives (1890), sans photography. Cubans’ everyday struggles and illicit “hacks” to obtain food and transportation (“Invent, resolve, escape” and “Camels in the Caribbean”), the sad reality of Cuba’s much vaunted systems education and health care (“Spirit and Material”), and their ongoing search for something to believe in (“The Return of God”) are all richly described, as is the pervasive sense of failure and hopelessness as Cubans face an uncertain future after 40 years of Revolution (“Where Are We Going?”). This series and many of Rivero’s other pieces can be found reprinted in the three volumes of crónicas that collected his work from Cuba Press originally written between 1995 and 2003. They are Pruebas de contacto (Proof of Contact, 2003), Sin pan y sin palabras (Without Bread and Without Words, 2003), and Lesiones de historia (Lesions of History, 2005).

Hermanitos

"El Yuma" & "OLPL" 
Foto tomada por Mónica López la noche del viernes, 25 de abril de 2025, en Nueva York, 14 años después de nuestro primer encuentro y entrevista en La Habana

En 2011, cuando las calles de La Habana tenían ese color de sol filtrado por historia y esperanza, Ted Henken llegó con una libreta abierta y una cámara encendida, pero sobre todo con el corazón dispuesto a escuchar. Fue uno de los primeros académicos estadounidenses en sentarse contigo no desde la distancia, sino desde el mismo banco, bajo el mismo cielo, con el mismo deseo de entender lo humano detrás de lo político. 

En su canal de YouTube (1 & 2), Ted registró esos encuentros como quien guarda fuego en una cajita de cartón: con cuidado, con cariño. Las entrevistas que te hizo no eran interrogatorios ni reportajes: eran conversaciones. Tú hablabas con ese estilo tuyo —medio filósofo, medio trovador— y él asentía, preguntaba, se reía contigo. Se hablaba de Cuba, del arte, del exilio interior, de las cicatrices que no siempre se ven, y de cómo la palabra puede ser resistencia, puente o bálsamo. 

Aquel diálogo no fue solo un testimonio público, fue un acto de complicidad. En un tiempo donde hablar claro podía costar caro, ustedes se regalaron el lujo de la franqueza. Y eso quedó grabado, no solo en video, sino en la memoria de quienes creen que la amistad también es una forma de activismo.

PARTE I

PARTE II

Nota: En abril de 2011, hice una visita a La Habana para entrevistar a blogueros cubanos. El 25 de abril, me encontré con OLPL en pleno Plaza de Armas de la Habana Vieja para hacer este par de grabaciones cortas porque Orlando no fue permitido salir para participar en un evento del Americas Society de Nueva York. 

Catorce años después, en la noche del 25 de abril de 2025, nos encontramos de nuevo en el apartamento que comparte en Manhattan con Mónica López para repasar nuestras memorias de aquellos días inolvidables. 

Resulta que - después de demasiadas copas de vino - a Orlando se le ocurrió pedir a la inteligencia artificial (AI) componer un resumen medio poético / medio cheo de nuestro primer encuentro.

Aquí arriba tienen el resultado!   

Sinning Against the Revolution or Sinning Against Journalism?

Last year I co-wrote the academic article “Diasporic Epistemologies in Cuban Independent Journalism” (Digital Journalism, February 15, 2024), with my colleague Sara García Santamaría. A few weeks ago, the college student Max Rhoads contacted me saying he had read it and was working on a term paper about the state of Cuban journalism and that he wanted to interview me.

Yesterday we did the interview.

Max kindly transcribed it and shared it with me so I could share it with you here!

Enjoy!

I gave it the snarky title:

"Sinning Against the Revolution or Sinning Against Journalism?

That is the Question!"

Interview of Ted A. Henken 

Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies 

Baruch College, CUNY 

Conducted by Max Rhoads April 22, 2025

Max Rhoads: Before we start, would you mind introducing yourself? 

Ted Henken: My name is Ted Henken. I’m a professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Baruch College here in New York City, part of CUNY, and my specialty is Cuba. I’ve written a number of books about Cuba and done a lot of research about and in Cuba. 

MR: Thank you. My first question is can you briefly describe the state of journalism in Cuba, giving a rough overview. 

TH: The easiest way to think about journalism in Cuba is that it is basically divided into two parts. 

There is what you might call “official journalism,” that is controlled by the Cuban Communist Party, and essentially, that is propaganda that makes the party look good and tends to celebrate the system and the Revolution, and attack or show bad news about the rest of the world, especially the United States. 

Then there is a form of journalism that is the other half of the coin, which has different names. You could call it “alternative,” you could call it “non-state” or “non-official,” or you could call it “independent” because it’s independent of the government and the party. I call it independent journalism, although people have different names for it. 

And that journalism has existed for about 35-40 years, since the late 1980s or early 1990s, and today, it is maybe especially relevant, powerful, and important because of the access to the Internet that the world and Cuba has. 

MR: How much influence would you say the Cuban government has on its country’s journalism? 

TH: Well, you can extrapolate from the first answer I gave that the government tries to control the state sector, or the official journalism sector. First, because it has lots of influence and control over education. And then, almost all the media outlets, whether they’re newspapers or television stations or radio stations or magazines, are published and funded - and the people who work on them are paid - by the government. So, the government has a huge amount of control. That’s why I call it the “official media.” 

Of course, because any system that tries to absolutely control something will inevitably fail, and in the act of trying to control it, will alienate and push people to rebel, or to leave, or to quit, or to try to do something renegade. And so, it has very little control over independent journalism, that’s why we call it “independent journalism.” 

But there’s kind of a battle going on because independent journalism exists, but for a long time, it was hard for Cubans to read, or hear, or get access to what they produced. But that has changed. Every year, more people have access because there’s more general access via the Internet. But the Cuban government also tries to control that by harassing, repressing, jailing, and exiling independent journalists. So, it doesn’t control that, but it certainly tries to repress it. 

MR: In the paper you recently co-published with Sara García Santamaría, “Diasporic Epistemologies in Cuban Independent Journalism” (Digital Journalism, February 15, 2024), you wrote that most of the independent journalists weren’t completely against the Cuban Communist Party, but simply wished to express themselves freely. Could you say more about that, and do you have examples of the criticisms some of these journalists had? 

TH: The first thing I would say is that for various reasons that are quite complex, Cuban journalists try not to run afoul of the government. Partly because they don’t want to end up in jail or in exile. But also, in part, because, to a certain degree, they want to be neutral, or objective. That’s kind of an ideal in journalism. 

But also, they were raised, socialized, or even "brainwashed" to believe in the system, and in the Revolution. And so, it’s a complex mixture of self-preservation, opportunism, and belief. 

But in my experience, what happens then is that, once a journalist tries to establish some form of independence, even if the journalist avoids becoming anti-regime or a political dissident, the government sees almost any expression of independence as itself dissidence. 

And therefore, what happens is, when these journalists take a little step into the independent world, the government punishes them, threatens them, and they become more alienated, and they become less inclined to want to work with the government at all. 

And so, some of them just shut up and stop being journalists, but others become radicalized, and maybe more against the government. They may believe in some, or a lot of the ideals of socialism, but they also believe in journalistic independence, and in the truth, or in the facts, and the professional journalistic mission and ethos. 

But they realize - usually very gradually and through trial and error - that there is no coexistence. If they are committed professionals, then they’re going to sin against the Revolution, and if they are committed revolutionaries, they’re going to sin against journalism, so it’s really hard for them to be both. 

If they do real journalism, it will be interpreted as anti-government, because it won’t be controlled by the government. And so, it becomes almost like a snowball effect, where they become more and more alienated from the system, even if they started out from the idea that they were just going to do straight journalism or “periodismo y punto,” as the leading young independent journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez told me was his original intention when he and some friends co-founded the digital magazine El Estornudo almost a decade ago, and not anti-regime, or political or dissident journalism. 

But one of the things that happens, especially to journalists is that - when we talk about classic liberal freedoms, one of those things is freedom of expression or freedom of speech… and when journalists try to practice those freedoms and are repressed, then by the very fact of them being journalists, they become activists for freedom of expression. Even if they don’t want to become activists per se. In the very fact of being journalists, they become activists, if only in the narrow sense of advocating for, and defending, and practicing independence and free thought and free expression (in the context of a dictatorship). 

MR: I’m aware there’s been a lot of laws that have been passed in the last few years limiting not only what journalists can say on the Internet, but also what Cubans as a whole have access to. So, have there been any new developments since you published that article last year, and if you published another paper on this topic, what would you want to include? 

TH: That paper is a snapshot from around the 2021-2023 period, but it does capture a kind of arc, and that arc is the development of independent digital journalism, and at the same time, the tragic exile of most independent journalists, and that’s why the paper focuses on the “digital diaspora.” 

As we say in the paper, many of the people who we focus on lived in Cuba when we started writing the paper, but by the time the paper came out, they were almost all gone. So that tells you what’s happening. 

There are two things I would say that are new, or interesting, or different, that aren’t in that paper, maybe, or aren’t emphasized in that paper. 

(1) One is that this is a song that has been on repeat for 60 years. Meaning that, because the Cuban government controls history, and disposes of history it doesn’t want people to know about, every generation has to relearn the lessons that were learned by the previous generation. 

Because the people who went through that - the last generation - they’re in jail, they’re dead, or they’re in exile, and you don’t have access to their stories. So, you have to learn the hard way what they learned 10, 20, or 30 years before. And that is that, in trying to create a “revolutionary journalism,” the Cuban government created a propaganda arm of the Party that just told it what it wanted to hear, and didn’t do journalism. 

And then people who tried to do actual journalism “within the revolution” were often thrown under the bus, into prison, and/or driven into exile, and then that would happen again and again and again. 

So, the things that have happened to this new generation of digital journalists, even though the context is new because it’s the digital world where you can do this kind of stuff because of the Cloud and because of access to the Internet, and things aren’t just published in paper anymore, they’re digital, online… But you still have the same series of steps that the government will take against people in progression: 

First, they try to socialize them and control them through their mind and through their job. 

Then, if they step out of line, warn them. Then, if they keep stepping out of line, raid their house, threaten them with jail, threaten their family, claim that they are paid by the CIA or they are working for other anti-Cuban interests. 

And then put them in jail and send them into exile or both. And this cycle repeats itself. 

It’s kind of like The Book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible: “There’s nothing new under the sun.” 

(2) The other thing that I would say is that, yes, in the past five years, the government has kind of woken up and tried to arm itself legally to have the laws in the books to punish speech it doesn’t like that is on the Internet. And so, there are five or six recent laws, or policies, or things that have been passed that simply give it more legal cover to do what it has always done, but now on the Internet. 

So, we could highlight some of those… and there are a number of them. But maybe it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to get into the details, because they’re all basically the same thing, which is: 

Be careful of what you write on the Internet because there’s a sword of Damocles over your head, and at any moment, you could be harassed or formally charged and sent to prison, so stop doing it or leave the country. 

MR: I know you said this has been an ongoing battle for the last 60 years, however, would you say this repressive climate started with Castro, or were there stepping stones to it? Was there a set path to it? 

TH: Well, Cuba has never been totally free, open, and democratic either in government or journalism. What I mean is that there have always been problems or obstacles or censorship or control of the media. 

I think the biggest difference, however, is that, before Castro, the media was mainly controlled through carrots, meaning that the government bribed lots of journalists and newspapers and magazines, paid them off. They basically used money as a carrot to incentivize good coverage. 

It was basically a corrupt system, but at the same time, it was a system that was extremely rich in the number of newspapers and magazines, and the rich diversity of ferment and thought and debate within the various newspapers. There was a Communist newspaper, there was a right-wing newspaper, there were all these different things. 

Now of course, at different times, depending on what was happening politically or militarily, they might be shut down, or clandestine, or other things… I’m writing a book about all of this. I have a whole chapter that tells the story of what the media was like under the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista. But I would say that generally, there was censorship that was mainly through the carrot, but sometimes through the stick. 

Whereas under Castro, it’s really an environment of a different kind, because it is an attempt to monopolize totally the official story and demonize anything that’s outside of that through the closing down or the taking over of all media, so that there is no private media or independent media, there’s just a government truth and a “revolutionary” media. 

So, it’s a radical shift because it goes from a free system that is corrupt and has lots of censorship to a system of state propaganda. That’s what I would say is the main difference. 

There are stories that you could tell, and that are told, about various currents within the Revolution that tried to have a modicum of independence, a modicum of criticism, that are noteworthy and important. But they’re all existing within a media landscape where there’s a will to almost absolutely control communication and information and it was achieved for almost 40 years (1959-1995) but has broken down significantly over the past 30 (1995-2025). 

MR: And that brings me to my last question: where do you see Cuban journalism in five years? Do you think it’s going to get any better, or do you think the government is going to respond with increasing repression? 

TH: Well, I don’t think that we can expect anything on the part of the government that would make things better. There’s no chance of that, or almost no chance of that. 

I would say that a couple things are promising and a few others are threatening. There’s an article that I wrote - it’s published in Spanish - called “Independent Digital Cuban Journalism: The Best of Times and the Worst of Times.” 

In it, I discuss how there has been a true BOOM in the number, diversity, and professionalism of all these independent digital media outlets that are Cuban, that are now mostly run from outside of Cuba, but most of which were founded within Cuba. Now, given that their founders have been living in exile, many of the newsrooms are multi-located, meaning that there are people who live in Miami, Madrid, and Mexico City, and wherever else, and they all work together, in the same virtual newsroom. 

The other thing that’s really important about all of these organizations is that they have an increasing and now majority readership in Cuba. Before, when they started out, most of the people who read them were outside of Cuba. Now, between 60% and 80%, maybe even 90% of their viewers or readers are in Cuba. 

Turing to “the worst of times,” there are two or three things that I would say about that: 

One is, of course, that repression and exile have continued. The government has continued to repress, so almost none of these outlets - although most of them were founded in Cuba - still have the main people who run them in Cuba anymore. So that’s the first thing: repression and exile are now the rule and not the exception. 

And then there are two other things that are interesting and fascinating, and maybe very sad, but important. 

(1) One is that we live in the “post-truth Trump era.” Of course, it’s not all Trump’s fault, but I’ll label it with his name. What I mean is that one of the great and terrible things about the Internet is that anybody can say whatever they want. But journalism isn’t about anybody saying what they want. Journalism is about somebody who is a trained professional with a set of ethics and a systematized way of working that tries to get to the truth in a responsible way, not to get clicks and likes and followers. 

The democratization of the media because of the ubiquity of the Internet and the potential of turning everybody not just into a consumer but also a producer, is on the one hand great, but on the other hand terrible. 

There was a book that came out almost 20 years ago in 2007 that warned about this problem. It was called “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” by Andrew Keen. The idea of the book is that the democratization or “amateurization” of the media is - which was thought to be a benefit for journalism – has turned out to be a major even mortal threat to it. 

Yes, in places like Cuba, people who aren’t part of the system can tell the truth when the system is lying. But in places like the United States, or anywhere else in the world, anybody with whatever agenda, with some or even almost no knowledge of the Internet and some money, can spread lies, disinformation, misinformation, innuendo, and you’ll have an audience, and maybe that will be a significant audience where you sow doubt and confusion. 

That’s a big problem. And it’ll just continue to be a problem for Cuba, because it’s a problem for everybody. 

And some of these very heroic independent Cuban journalists, they’re part of an ecosystem that has YouTubers, and influencers and those YouTubers and those influencers, and that ecosystem has that whole irresponsible celebrity tendency that the whole world has that pays more attention to flash than fact. And so that’s problematic. 

(2) The other problem that’s also ironic in this case that Cuban journalism is facing is based on the fact that a good part of independent Cuban journalism has always found support abroad. Meaning that either the United States government, or some entity that’s funded by the United States government, or some entity in a third country, whether that’s Holland or the Czech Republic or Norway, would be interested in supporting independent voices around the world, including in Cuba, and would help either train, or fund, or finance, or support in a lot of different ways independent journalists. 

Now this was necessary, and is necessary for a lot of reasons, but it has two big problems. 

(a) One is that the government of Cuba can then argue that these people aren’t independent, they’re working for someone else abroad. They’re mercenaries, essentially, is what the government says. They’re working for the money, “the Yankee dollar” or whatever. While that’s generally just manipulation and propaganda, that is an argument that sometimes convinces people. 

(b) The other problem is that, if any of these independent, or non-state media platforms becomes too dependent on foreign support in their business model, if that foreign support disappears, they have to close down. So, because of Trump’s policy, that is being implemented through DOGE and Musk, to radically cut government spending and especially support for any kind of international aid, there’s been a tremendous hit to independent or non-state Cuban journalism. 

I have a friend, the editor-in-chief of a leading independent news outlet - who describes it as a “mass extinction event,” like a meteor hitting independent Cuban journalism, because so many of the independent media outlets were partly dependent on support from the US government in one way or another, and have had to either close down or radically cut back on their work. 

And so, I would say that, the amateurization of journalism because of the digital media world we live in on the one hand, and this issue of over-reliance on foreign support, are two things that will be issues going forward.

The Danger of Thinking and Loving: Yndamiro Restano and the Birth of Independent Journalism in Cuba

El Yuma with Yndamiro Restano, June 30, 2023, Miami.
Photo by Amparo López Pujol

"La prensa independiente sirve para sacar a la luz lo que las ideologías ocultan.” -Yndamiro Restano – October 31, 2022

The humble beginnings of Cuba’s now surging, decidedly digital, and transnational movement of independent journalism date to an otherwise unexceptional April morning in 1985. 

That day, a 36-year-old reporter with Radio Rebelde named Rolando Yndamiro Restano Díaz who covered the agricultural beat for the renowned station (first established by Carlos Franqui as the clandestine arm of the July 26th Movement in the late 1950s) took out his trusty Underwood typewriter and produced what would become the island’s first independent newspaper. It was a handmade broadsheet just a single-page in length emblazoned with the heading, Nueva Cuba. 

Restano – who died in exile in Miami earlier this year where I met and interviewed him in June 2023 - normally used Yndamiro as his first name. That April morning, Yndamiro laboriously typed out 50 identical copies of the missive and distributed them up and down the streets of his Vedado neighborhood in Havana with one ending up pinned to a wall in the famed Coppelia ice cream parlor at the crest of the La Rampa shopping district in the heart of the Vedado business district. 

At this early stage, however, Yndamiro had no intention of criticizing Fidel Castro’s government itself, starting a dissident movement, or much less calling for wholesale regime change. Instead, he sought to share what he considered vital information about the disturbing realities of Cuba’s wasteful and woefully inefficient state farms systematically censored by the official press and hidden from view by the powerful bureaucrats who oversaw such farms. 

Believing that access to such information was not only a public right but also an essential antidote to the many bureaucratic errors (or worse) committed in secret, Yndamiro thought that the light of day and the exposure to public opinion might help remedy such abuses. As a journalist, he also believed that it was his professional duty to report on these issues. 

Much like what life-long journalist Reinaldo Escobar would also attempt to do from the pages of Juventud Rebelde in the coming years (1987-1988) before being unceremoniously sacked himself, Yndamiro was animated by the hope of producing what he thought of as a truly “revolutionary” form of journalism that would expose what was not working in Cuba’s socialist system so that it could be “rectified.” Also, like Reinaldo, at this stage Yndamiro thought that Cuba’s problems arose from an incorrect application of the doctrine of state socialism and not from an inherent, fatal flaw in the system itself. 

Finally, he shared Reinaldo's ultimately dashed hope that a Cuban-style “rectification of errors” (declared as state policy by Fidel Castro in 1986) would emulate the policies of glasnost and perestroika then gaining steam in the Soviet Union instead of closing ranks and guarding against them – as turned out to the be the case. 

In other words, Yndamiro did not set out to become a political dissident in his valiant if quixotic launch of Nueva Cuba but an independent journalist. His aim was not only to break away from the propagandistic straight-jacket of the official media but also to avoid any blanket condemnation of the Revolution to which he and at least three generations of his family had dedicated their lives. 

But in this he turned out to be sorely mistaken and more than a little naïve. Indeed, instead of provoking a critical and corrective investigation of the mismanagement of state farms, Yndamiro’s unauthorized circulation of his mimeographed broadsheet – outside the strictly controlled official media system – unleashed the full force of Cuban state security against him. 

However, Yndamiro was not content to publish his independent journalism abroad in German or English translation (as Reinaldo was beginning to do at this time). Indeed, his insistence on self-publishing his exposé and having it circulate within the island for a Cuban audience forced him to quickly face the fact that in the eyes of the island’s Gestapo-like security enforcers independent journalists and political dissidents are one and the same. 

This same lesson would be hard-learned by all future generations of “renegade” journalists who dared to break out of the official state media monopoly and launch their own independent journalism projects.

***

The above narrative of Yndamiro Restano’s personal background and activities as a pioneering Cuban independent journalist forms the introductory section of a full chapter I have written about Yndamiro's essential contribution to kickstarting the rebirth of the free press in Cuba between the 1985 self-publication of Nueva Cuba and his 1995 exile (a trajectory interrupted by the three-and-a half years he spent in jail in Cuba as a political prisoner as punishment for his independent "thinking and loving"). 

The chapter is part of a larger book I am working on about the independent journalism movement in Cuba over the past half-century and is based on various interviews I conducted with Yndamiro by telephone and in person between 2021 and 2023. I thank Amparo López Pujol for her help in facilitating those interviews and for providing me with other background information on Yndamiro's impactful life and career. 

If you want to learn more about Yndamiro and can't wait for the publication of my book (!), key sources that have proven vital in my reconstruction of this all-important decade in Restano’s political and professional trajectory (1985-1995) include Reina (1995), Bilello (1997), Mari (2006), García (2017), and especially Beaulieu (2014). Restano’s own “Testimony of an Independent Journalist,” originally published in El Nuevo Herald in May 1996 and later included in the book Desde Cuba con valor (Editorial Pliegos, 1997), has also proven very useful. 

"Havana: The Forbidden City": The first thing I ever published about Cuba (spring 1998)!

It has been almost five years since I last posted anything to my blog, "El Yuma." 

As you can see below, that was a post on November 1, 2020 (en plena pandemia y campaña electoral norteamericana), entitled, "Trump: Elections, What For?" 

Can anyone spot the historical reference in my snarky title?

Well, we know how that went... 

While I can't promise that I will be back to blogging on as regular a basis as I did back between 2009 and 2014, I do think that getting off of Facebook (and other social media sites that I will not mention here) in order to post things of a bit longer, more reflective nature, can be good for us at this time. 

So... 

As the title of this post suggests, here I'm sharing "the first thing I ever published about Cuba." 

I found it as I was rummaging through some old files. I wrote it 27 years ago (!) in the spring of 1998. 

It's a 3-page reflection I published in the Curriculum Resource Center Newsletter of the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University (where I was then a graduate student) about my first ever visit to Cuba for three weeks in the summer of 1997. 

Enjoy and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who takes the time to read it. 

I'm especially curious to hear if my impressions of Cuba at time (1997) jibe with your own and how it sounds to you now 27 years later. 

It is available here as a PDF and below in photo format (if you click on each photo you will get a more legible version).