(RSF/IFEX) – Cuban journalist Raul Rivero has won the Reporters sans frontieres – Fondation de France prize for 1997. The award was to be presented to the director of the news agency Cuba Press at 11:30 am on 10 December 1997 at the Espace Electra, Paris. Rivero was unable to collect his prize in person […]
(RSF/IFEX) – Cuban journalist Raul Rivero has won the Reporters
sans frontieres – Fondation de France prize for 1997. The award
was to be presented to the director of the news agency Cuba Press
at 11:30 am on 10 December 1997 at the Espace Electra, Paris.
Rivero was unable to collect his prize in person because he fears
that he would not be allowed back into Cuba to continue his work
as head of Cuba Press. Eduardo Manet, a Cuban writer and winner
of the Interallie Prize in 1996, was to receive the award on his
behalf. It was to be presented by the 1996 winner, Turkish
journalist Isik Yurtcu, editor of the pro-Kurdish daily “Ozgur
Gundem”, who was arrested on 28 December 1994 and sentenced to
fourteen years and ten months in jail. He was released on 15
August 1997.
The prize is given to journalists who, through their work,
beliefs or attitudes, have demonstrated their devotion to the
ideal of press freedom.
Worth 50,000 French francs, it was awarded in previous years to
Zlatko Dizdarevic (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992), Wang Juntao (China,
1993), Andre Sibomana (Rwanda, 1994), Christina Anyanwu (Nigeria,
1995) and Yurtcu (Turkey, 1996).
The RSF international office put forward five candidates for the
1997 award: Gabriel Michi, an Argentinean journalist with the
weekly “Noticias”; San San Nweh, a Burmese journalist and writer;
Faraj Sarkoohi, director of the Iranian monthly “Adineh”; and
Doan Viet Hoat, director of “Dien Dan Tu Do” in Vietnam.
Rivero, one of the pioneers of the dissident press in Cuba with
Nestor Baguer, director of Apic, is determined to stay on the
island. In spite of threats from the state security services, he
is continuing to run the Cuba Press news agency, which he founded
in 1995.
Since the heads of three other news agencies – BPIC, Habana Press
and Patria – went into exile, tension has been mounting around
the remaining figurehead of dissident journalism: Rivero was
arrested in July and then held for three days in August 1997, and
six of his agency’s staff have recently run into trouble with the
political police.
Born in 1945 near Camaguey, in central Cuba, Rivero was one of
the first generation of journalists trained at the Havana faculty
of journalism after the 1959 revolution. In 1966, he was one of
the thirteen founders of Caiman Barbudo, a critical cultural
magazine. He was Prensa Latina’s Moscow correspondent from 1973
to 1976, and on his return to Cuba he headed the science and
culture service of the state news agency.
In 1989, Rivero resigned from the official National Union of
Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC). Two years later he made a
clean break with the regime by signing the “ten intellectuals’
letter”, a petition calling on President Fidel Castro to free
prisoners of conscience. Of the ten signatories, Raul Rivero is
the only one still living in Cuba. He abandoned official
journalism in 1991, denouncing it as “fiction about a country
that does not exist”.
Rivero is also known for his literary activities. In 1968, he was
awarded the Julian del Casal prize for his first poetic works. He
has published several collections of poems in Cuba: “The Role of
Man” (1969), “Poetry on Earth” (1973), “Heart to Offer” (1980),
“Public Poetry” (1981) and “A Certain Poetry” (1984). In 1980
came a collection of interviews with Cuban intellectuals,
“Strictly Personal”, and the same year he recounted his Soviet
experiences in “The Snow Conquered – Moscow Chronicles”. Rivero’s
latest book, “Signed in Havana”, was published in Miami in 1996.
His books are now banned in Cuba.
