Here’s the second article from the New Times’ “Our woman in Havana”, on independent journalist Carlos Rios Otero:
Press Time
With Fidel on his death bed, journalist Carlos Otero is more critical than everBy Our Woman in Havana
Article Published Jan 11, 2007Carlos at his home in Havana Carlos Rios Otero is trying to write a note, but his black pen has run out of ink. He shakes it furiously, tries to scribble on a piece of thin white paper, and then tosses it on the table.
He shoots the pen a nasty glare, grabs it again, and flings it high into the air.
Carlos is frustrated. The pen is just one more thing that doesn’t work in Cuba.
He is trying to change that, one word at a time. He is the rarest of rare on the island — an independent journalist.
But this writer doesn’t work for a state-run communist-mouthpiece rag like Granma or Juventud Rebelde. His articles are penned sometimes by candlelight, always in longhand, on the unused side of printed sheets of paper. When he’s finished, Carlos whispers his words across crackling phone lines to Miami, where Cuban exiles make sense of them and put them into magazines read by other exiles around the world. Sometimes he appears on Spanish-language radio stations like Radio Mambí (710-AM).
Read the whole excellent eye-opening thing here.
You were right. eyeopening. lots of documentation. very different from the suff we’re used to getting. i hope they keep this series up. Reporters doing what they are supposed to do: telling the truth. i’m hoping it becomes the thing to do. the next fad.
Now the new York Times has to write an article like this one.
Been a lurker for some time. Though I truly cannot comprehend what an exile goes through, I have a good idea. Though I am now a citizen of the good old USA, I was born in Nicaragua. If you need to point a finger at some really dumb people, please feel free to use Nicaragua as an example of a populace that freely desires to be like Castro’s Cuba. Dont ask me why, since I havent had the urge to go in 30 years.