Media wake-up calls
By Manuel Alberto Ramy
From Ramy’s “A Correspondent’s Notebook” blog
Cuba has said goodbye to summer with block parties. The press has said goodbye with a couple of articles that may be a goodbye to the routine apologia — more harmful than the harsh and negative though sometimes positive reality — that is a part of Cubans’ lives.José Alejandro Rodríguez published in Juventud Rebelde — a newspaper that for some time now has been looking closely at problems in key sectors in a balanced way — an article in which he criticizes the practice of censorship. “The sickly obsession to protect ‘the image’ of the country, the ministry, the business, or the territory — often more recurrent than the concern for the actual messes that prevail — sometimes is paranoia over the fate of your post, your job and some other bagatelles, when the real issue is to improve reality,” he writes.
Rodríguez’s article, titled “Mirrors,” does not stop there. “Among other people, [this obsession] responds to a widespread confusion that a lot of them assume, perhaps without malice: the problems of the country, the ministry, the business, or the territory should not be aired publicly because they take away from the real achievements of the Revolution.”
From whom are we trying to conceal our conflicts, shortages and difficulties? From ourselves? From the two million tourists who visit us, who, aside from enjoying our natural, weather and human blessings, clearly perceive the dark and dense side that every society has and that, in our case, has been magnified by the major media?
This respectable and excellent journalist, who for 12 years has written a column where he receives questions and complaints from his readers and tries (sometimes futilely) to get an answer from the authorities, forgets that in Cuba, as in Miami, some people write and comment not for the public but to please powerful ears. To say what specific sectors want to hear here or in Miami (or to say it in Miami, aimed at Cuba) is not journalism but spiritual mendicity; it is an attempt to gain ground, to establish positions.
The other wake-up call appeared in the Aug. 31 issue of Granma, in an article that decries shoddiness in everyday work. Shoddiness “was not decreed by Marx or Lenin as a condition of the system that’s antagonistic to capitalism. Nevertheless, it is notorious and we coexist with it,” says the author, Félix López.
López cites the case of a multi-family building in the capital that won an “entrepreneurial excellence” award, yet, “some steps in the staircase seem ready to fall apart, the walls have cracked because of water leaks, the floors of the exterior hallways were never finished, and maintenance is not an up-to-date concept.”
It’s not a unique case. Some years ago, the main building of the CIMEX corporation, in Miramar, was completely overhauled. One week later, I went there to interview an official. In the brand-new waiting room, plastic pails collected the water from plumbing leaks in the ceiling.
Is all of Cuba like that? Certainly not. Some excellent work is done in all sectors; there are workers who, despite the difficulties that must be dealt with by pushing up their sleeves, produce with quality and efficiency. Where we have to insist is in our criticism of shoddy work, of bureaucratic decisions that impede or hamper technical criteria, of structures that sooner or later will have to be altered.
In socialism, the press plays an essential role, to the degree that it anticipates, denounces, opines and inquires at the same time that it praises accomplishments and efforts, such as the recently inaugurated and colossal first stage of the water pipeline from Cuba’s east to the west.
Balanced journalism is a win-win situation. The danger lies in the citizens’ inability to see themselves in the publications, read their feelings on the printed page or see them on the TV screen, or in their inability to stay ahead of media globalization, an enemy of every process of revolutionary change.
Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the English-language version of Progreso Weekly.
To read the article “Mirrors” in Juventud Rebelde (in Spanish), click below.
