Kudos to Gary Marx, who stories have been linked here at Babalu, imagine if every journalist based in Havana told the truth instead of parroting the official party line. Imagine.
Chicago – Cuba has told a Chicago Tribune correspondent that his stories were too “negative” and that he can no longer report from the country, the paper said on Thursday.
Correspondent Gary Marx, who has been based in Havana since 2002, was told on Wednesday that his press credentials will not be renewed and that he and his family must leave the country within 90 days, the Tribune said.
“They said I’ve been here long enough and they felt my work was negative,” Marx told the paper. “They did not cite any examples.”
A reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, which is owned by the Tribune Company, will continue to staff the media conglomerate’s Havana office. Cuban officials told Marx that they would welcome an application from a new Chicago Tribune correspondent.
The story is here.
Ziva, adding insult to injury: Castro is receiving a price from “Federación Latinoaméricana de Periodistas” due to his permanent fight for the true. It’s so full of … (link, source, both in Spanish).
Someone commented on another blog that it was ironic that someone named Marx was being expelled from Communist Cuba.
Nothing ironic about it. Karl Marx wouldn’t feel comfortable in Cuba, even if they did rename the old Blanquita Theatre after him. The perenially impoverished Marx, who practically invented class hatred, would have no sympathy with Castro and the regime’s other plutocrats, all of whom practice personal capitalism, a brand so rapacious that even Marx couldn’t imagine it. Personal capitalism involves using all the nation’s resources for the benefit of a ruling clique and denying the workers the means of production so that they will aways remain serfs in the plutocrats’ fiefdom. If Marx had known that communism would evolve into feudalism, I am sure he would have put his pen down and tended to the lice, flees and anal boils that plagued him all his life (yes, it’s in all his biographies: Marx was a martyr to vermin).