RAUL RIVERO - International Press Institute Press Freedom Hero

RAUL RIVERO

Raúl Rivero is banned from publishing in Cuba, his native country,
because he is viewed as a dissident. He was one of 10 journalists to
sign the 1991 Carta de los Intelectuales, a petition urging Fidel Castro
to free prisoners of conscience. His exit and re-entry permits have been
consistently denied.
Raúl Rivero is one of Cuba's best-known dissident journalists and a
figurehead of the country's beleaguered independent press. He has faced
relentless harassment from Fidel Castro's communist regime and its
security agency since leaving the state-controlled press in 1988 because
of growing disillusionment with Cuba's political system.
Rivero was born in 1945 in Morón, Camagüey, in central Cuba. He was
among the first generation of journalists trained at Havana University's
School of Journalism after the 1959 revolution, and he co-founded the
satirical magazine Caimán Barbudo in 1966. He worked as Moscow
correspondent for the government news agency, Prensa Latina, from 1973
to 1976 before returning to Cuba to head the agency's science and
culture service.
Rivero resigned from the National Union of Cuban Writers in 1989 and
made a formal break with the regime two years later when on June 2,
1991, he signed the famous Carta de los Intelectuales (Intellectuals'
Letter), a petition calling on Castro to free prisoners of conscience.
Of the 10 signatories, he is the only one still living in Cuba. Rivero
abandoned official journalism in 1991, denouncing it as "fiction about a
country that does not exist."
In 1995 Rivero founded CubaPress, one of a handful of independent, and
illegal, news agencies set up by dissident journalists in order to
provide an alternative to Cuba's state-owned media. Like the country's
other 40-odd journalists working outside the state media, Rivero is
viewed as a political dissident and cannot publish or broadcast in Cuba.
Instead, he sends his work abroad for circulation on the Internet and in
U.S. and European publications, although publishing abroad can result in
a jail sentence for spreading "enemy propaganda."
Rivero's movements have been restricted, and he has been routinely
threatened, detained and interrogated by state security forces. He has
also been harassed by members of El Sistema Unico de Vigilancia y
Protección, a Cuban vigilante group tied to the Communist Party.
Officials have told him he can leave Cuba as long as he does not try to
come back, but, because he is determined to pursue his profession in
Cuba, his exit and re-entry permit applications have been consistently
denied.
Rivero is also a poet of renown, and he is regional vice chairman for
Cuba of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) Committee on Freedom
of the Press and Information.
A recipient of numerous press freedom awards, including the IAPA Grand
Prize for Press Freedom, Rivero was most recently awarded the 1999 Maria
Moors Cabot Prize of Columbia University's Graduate School of
Journalism. He could not accept it in person because he was refused
permission to travel abroad.
In a February 1999 piece entitled "Journalism Belongs to Us All," Rivero
reflected on the work of journalists trying to report freely on
developments in Cuba. "Nobody, no law can make me take on the mentality
of a gangster or other criminal simply because I report the arrest of a
dissident or bring to light the prices of the basic alimentary products
for survival in Cuba or edit a note saying that it seems like a disaster
to me that more than 20,000 Cubans leave their homeland each year for
exile in the United States or that hundreds of others desperately try to
get away to some place, any place. Nobody can make me feel like a
criminal, an enemy target or a turncoat or any of the other name-calling
nouns the government uses to try to degrade or humiliate us. I am merely
a man who writes. One who writes in the country where I was born."

http://www.freemedia.at/Heroes_IPIReport2.00/40Riveiro.htm