Being a Journalist in Cuba - Success Is Measured By Your Ability To Make Things Up

Yoani Sanchez Award-winning Cuban blogger

Being a Journalist in Cuba: Success Is Measured By Your Ability To Make
Things Up
Posted: 02/06/2014 4:05 pm EST Updated: 02/06/2014 4:59 pm EST

ARTICLE 53. Citizens have freedom of speech and of the press in keeping
with the objectives of socialist society. Material conditions for the
exercise of that right are provided by the fact that the press, radio,
television, cinema, and other mass media are state or social property
and can never be private property. This assures their use at exclusive
service of the working people and in the interests of society.
Reinaldo speaks little of his time as an official journalist. When he
does, it is with a mixture of frustration and relief. The first from his
responsibility for the fabrication of so many stereotypes, and the
second because by expelling him from the newspaper Juventud Rebelde
(Rebel Youth) they turned him into a free man. Cuba International
Magazine holds a prominent place in his memories, as he worked there for
almost fifteen years.

In our house we have created an entire category of news with the name of
this publication. When a provincial correspondent speaks on TV of the
marvels of a battery factory -- without mentioning how many are actually
being produced -- we watch, laugh, and say to ourselves: "This is in the
worst style of Cuba Magazine." If there is an article in the press
presenting the life of a small provincial town through rose-colored
glasses, we connect this, as well, with the editorial approach that has
done and is doing so much damage.

Mayerín, unlike Reinaldo, just graduated from the Faculty of Social
Communication. Sometimes he calls from a public pay phone to tell me
about his latest article on a digital site he collaborates on. "Did you
see," he asks me, "what I managed to slip in in the third line of the
second paragraph?" So I go check my reporter friend's daring and find
that instead of writing "our beloved and invincible Commander-in-Chief,"
he has simply put "Fidel Castro." Keep up your daring work!

Several generations of information professionals have had to approach
their work through censorship, ideological propaganda and the applause
of power. Sugarcoating reality, using national media as a showcase for
false achievements and filling newspapers with a doctored and distorted
Cuba, these are some of the evils of our national press. If these
deformations leave a sour taste the mouths of readers and television
viewers, the effect is even worse on the journalists themselves.

The informants end up prostituting their words to stay out of trouble or
to earn certain privileges, and the social prestige of the reporter
plummets and the press becomes an instrument of political domination.
For this informant, who as a child dreamed of uncovering some scandal or
investigating an event to its ultimate consequences, all he is left with
is folding or breaking down the door, continuing to put make-up on
reality, or being declared a "non-journalist" by the government.

Source: Being a Journalist in Cuba: Success Is Measured By Your Ability
To Make Things Up | Yoani Sanchez -
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yoani-sanchez/being-a-journalist-in-cub_b_4740613.html