Cuba wouldn't print this

Cuban television is pretty unbearable. Hours of documentaries on the revolution are interspersed by a few news bulletins, strictly devoid of news. Instead, they almost invariably focus on the plight of “The Miami Five,” a group of Cubans in jail in Florida on charges of spying. Or, as the Havana newsreader will tell you "illegally imprisoned by the Empire.” The only thing really considered worth watching on the island are Mexican soap operas.

Television censorship is part of life in Cuba. Cubans take the shortage of information in the same stride as the shortage of just about everything else. They have become famous for their ability to shrug it off.

Every now and then, though, some foreigner will turn up, and rub the average Cuban’s face in his state of subjugation. Independent Cuban journalist Oscar Mario González recently complained of an Italian who said that she spent four months of every year in Cuba living off the standard ration book.

“It‘s such a great way to lose weight,” she told González. Another asked how many times he’d seen Fidel Castro. All the time, every day of the week, he answered — on television.

Ignorant tourists telling Cubans how much they wish that they could live like them is bad enough, but the scathing hypocrisy displayed by some groups is as unbearable as the non-news reels. Attitudes regarding television censorship are exemplary of these double standards.

This weekend, Cubans were treated to an unusual broadcast. Hugo Chávez’s megalomaniacal show Aló Presidente (a recent episode lasted more than eight hours) was recorded and aired in Cuba to mark the 40 years since the death of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. To add to the festivities, the convalescent Fidel Castro put in an appearance. He chatted to Chávez live over the phone. It’s the first time any live broadcast of El Jefe Máximo has been made since he fell ill last year.

The broadcast of the Chávez show from Cuba and his chumming with Castro is just another way of rubbing the Cuban people’s face in the dirt. Press censorship in Cuba, a particularly sour aspect of life in that socialist dictatorship, is made all the more poignant by Chávez’s foray into local broadcasting there. In Venezuela, you can still zap away from the man’s endless waffling. Even despite the recent licence-revoking of RCTV, there is still a range of channels. In Cuba last Sunday there was no real alternative.

Venezuela and many other countries including Argentina often display a nauseating kind of hypocrisy where Cuba and the freedom of the press are concerned. The most recent example of such double standards is reported by the independent Cuban journalist Juan González Febles.

In his latest missive to the Miami based Cubanet newsservice, González Febles notes that on October 8 and 9 the board of Telesur met in Havana. This television network, launched by Chávez as a way of countering global media corporations, is also owned by Uruguay, Cuba, Bolivia and Argentina, where it airs on channel 7. Last week in Havana it welcomed its two newest members, Ecuador and Nicaragua. According to the network’s executives, they are working for “Latin American sovereignty in communication, a necessity for political sovereignty.”

While that conference got underway, employees of the state run telephone company Etecsa, a joint Cuban-Italian venture, were teaming up with police to track down illegal television satellite dishes across Havana. Owning such a device is against the law in Cuba. González reports that the operations took place in at least five different city neighbourhoods on October 10. The aim? To stop residents from accessing sources of information other than those provided by the government.

All international television stations are barred in Cuba, including Telesur. That’s right, even Chávez’revolutionary communications project is deemed too subversive for Cuban eyes by the enlightened communist leadership. Instead, a few of the channel’s educational programmes are broadcast through local stations at night.

Such was the focus of zealous Telesur executives as they sat around, as one of their members put it concisely, “bringing light to the hegemonic darkness that the privatized media impose,” while not far off Fidel Castro’s goons, sponsored by an EU member, cracked down on even the faintest glimmer of light.

It reminded me of an incident that I witnessed while in Havana during the celebrations for Castro’s 80th birthday in December 2006. It was after all 1500 of us invitees had lunched exorbitantly and for free at the hotel next to the Palacio de las Convenciones. In a conference hall full of Fidelistas from around the world, Italian veteran journalist Gianni Mina expounded upon the manipulation of mass media by corporations. He praised Cuba and the communist regime for its furthering of “freedom of expression.” I glanced down at my flimsy copy of the state run newspa- per Granma — one of only two available to Cubans — and felt sick to my full stomach.

This time it wasn’t an Italian journalist but Andrés Izarra, the Venezuelan in charge of Telesur, whose hypocrisy knew no limits. He told his Cuban hosts and the other directors that the channel was “an integrating force, looking to give a voice to those that have none,” while outside Etecsa and the police went about their repressive task.

I wonder if our Telesur representatives looked down at their copy of Granma, too.