Raúl Rivero, Cuba
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Sat, Apr 1 2000
Raúl Rivero is one of Cuba’s best-known dissident journalists and a figurehead of the country’s beleaguered independent press. He has faced relentless harassment from Fidel Castro’s communist regime and its security agency since leaving the state-controlled press in 1988 because of growing disillusionment with Cuba’s political system.
Rivero was born in 1945 in Morón, Camagüey, in central Cuba. He was among the first generation of journalists trained at Havana University’s School of Journalism after the 1959 revolution, and he co-founded the satirical magazine Caimán Barbudo in 1966. He worked as Moscow correspondent for the government news agency, Prensa Latina, from 1973 to 1976 before returning to Cuba to head the agency’s science and culture service.
Rivero resigned from the National Union of Cuban Writers in 1989 and made a formal break with the regime two years later when on June 2, 1991, he signed the famous Carta de los Intelectuales (Intellectuals’ Letter), a petition calling on Castro to free prisoners of conscience. Of the 10 signatories, he is the only one still living in Cuba. Rivero abandoned official journalism in 1991, denouncing it as “fiction about a country that does not exist.”
In 1995 Rivero founded CubaPress, one of a handful of independent, and illegal, news agencies set up by dissident journalists in order to provide an alternative to Cuba’s state-owned media. Like the country’s other 40-odd journalists working outside the state media, Rivero is viewed as a political dissident and cannot publish or broadcast in Cuba. Instead, he sends his work abroad for circulation on the Internet and in U.S. and European publications, although publishing abroad can result in a jail sentence for spreading “enemy propaganda.”
Rivero’s movements have been restricted, and he has been routinely threatened, detained and interrogated by state security forces. He has also been harassed by members of El Sistema Unico de Vigilancia y Protección, a Cuban vigilante group tied to the Communist Party. Officials have told him he can leave Cuba as long as he does not try to come back, but, because he is determined to pursue his profession in Cuba, his exit and re-entry permit applications have been consistently denied.
Rivero is also a poet of renown, and he is regional vice chairman for Cuba of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information.
A recipient of numerous press freedom awards, including the IAPA Grand Prize for Press Freedom, Rivero was most recently awarded the 1999 Maria Moors Cabot Prize of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He could not accept it in person because he was refused permission to travel abroad.
In a February 1999 piece entitled “Journalism Belongs to Us All,” Rivero reflected on the work of journalists trying to report freely on developments in Cuba. “Nobody, no law can make me take on the mentality of a gangster or other criminal simply because I report the arrest of a dissident or bring to light the prices of the basic alimentary products for survival in Cuba or edit a note saying that it seems like a disaster to me that more than 20,000 Cubans leave their homeland each year for exile in the United States or that hundreds of others desperately try to get away to some place, any place. Nobody can make me feel like a criminal, an enemy target or a turncoat or any of the other name-calling nouns the government uses to try to degrade or humiliate us. I am merely a man who writes. One who writes in the country where I was born.”