Exiled Journalist Encourages Citizen Reporting in Cuba
Exiled Cuban journalist Normando Hernández, right, answers questions at a luncheon at the National Endowment for Democracy through interpreter Aimel Rios Wong
Washington, D.C. – infoZine – Scripps Howard Foundation Wire – Today, he is the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy, where he studies how independent journalists may combat totalitarianism across the globe.
“The main road for a civil society is to inform citizens,” Hernández said through an interpreter at an NED luncheon Tuesday. “The Cuban government will not allow anything. We must take responsibility.”
Hernández suggested that the time is right to inspire change in the communist regime. He showed videos of rallies in Havana and elsewhere of Cuban citizens waving flags and shouting the Spanish words for freedom and justice, “Libertad!” and “Justicia!”
“These actions were impossible to take place 10 years ago,” he said. “They occur in public places, and citizens react positively to them.”Cuba has initiated free-market economic changes over the past two years, much as the Soviet Union embraced economic change beofore social change.
Hernández compared current independent media in Cuba to the Soviet policy of glasnost, which encouraged governmental openess and transperency.
The glasnost policy, however, was instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev’s government, while Fidel and Raul Castro have had nothing to do with the current change in Cuba.
“While all of this is incredibly significant,” Brandon Yoder, an NED program officer, said. “I think we are forcing the analogy if we go any further.”
Despite Hernández’s optomistic attitude, Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami, said that the spread of information on the island can be very difficult.
Gomez said he had just returned from a study trip to Cuba, where conditions were worse than he had expected.
“Cuba cannot have an Arab Spring because of a lack of social network,” he said. “Information will not go from Santiago to Havana and back, on opposite ends of the island.”
