Havana builds screen to block U.S. messages

Havana builds screen to block U.S. messages
Propaganda war betweeen Cuban billboards, U.S. electronic ticker

HAVANA, Cuba (Reuters) -- Bulldozers dug up a street in front of the U.S.
diplomatic mission in Havana on Wednesday apparently preparing to block the
view of an electronic billboard carrying U.S. messages that has angered
President Fidel Castro.
Brigades of workers began the task on Tuesday night, hours after Castro and
hundreds of thousands of Cubans marched past the mission to protest against
the five-foot-high (1.5- meter) ticker that streams messages across the
facade of the U.S. Interests Section.
U.S. diplomats said Cuba's communist authorities were building a concrete
wall or screen to obstruct view of the ticker, which displays messages to
the Cuban people, news headlines and quotes from Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma
Gandhi and Lech Walesa.
"It is very clear that the Cuban government is building a wall to cut off
dialogue," a spokesperson for the Interests Section said.
Cuban officials said they were extending an open-air stage that has been the
main venue for political rallies against the United States since 2000.
"We are expanding the Anti-Imperialist Stage," an official overseeing the
work said as an excavator ripped up the asphalt. Another said flag masts
would be erected on a new square.
The ticker across the 25 windows of the fifth floor of the Interests Section
on Havana's Malecon waterfront is a new salvo in a decades-old propaganda
war between Washington and Havana.
Tit-for-tat billboards
Last year Cuba set up billboards with pictures of abused Iraqi prisoners at
the site in reply to a Christmas decoration displaying the number of
dissidents jailed in a political crackdown.
On Tuesday, Castro called U.S. diplomats "cockroaches" and accused the
government of President George W. Bush of seeking a new crisis between the
United States and Cuba with "perfidious" provocations.
As Castro spoke from a podium, the U.S. ticker flashed "Conservatives win
elections in Canada" and other news headlines in bright letters in full view
of the marchers.
The headlines were followed by quotes from Lincoln, Gandhi and Walesa,
founder of the Solidarity movement that toppled Poland's communist
government and helped bring about the collapse of Soviet control over
Eastern Europe.
The ticker began flashing messages on January 16 with "I have a dream that
one day this nation will rise up" from black civil rights leader Martin
Luther King Jr's 1963 speech.
U.S. diplomats said they wanted to break the "information blockade" or
censorship of Cuba's state-run media.
Castro said Cuba would not accept the "perverse violation of its dignity and
sovereignty" and warned of a firm, though peaceful, Cuban response.
Organizers said 1.4 million people took part in Tuesday's six-hour
demonstration along the seafront.
The two governments, bitter enemies since Castro came to power in a 1959
revolution, do not have formal diplomatic relations. Interests offices were
opened in each other's capital during the Carter administration. Washington
has enforced sanctions against Cuba since 1962.

Copyright 2006 Reuters.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/01/25/cuba.usa.reut/index.html