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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 28, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Media conference in Cuba

By Sue Harris in Havana

Scores of journalists took part in an international alternative and community journalists' conference in Cuba in October. The conference was sponsored by the Committees in Defense of the Revolution and the Jose Marti International Institute of Journalism.

This was the first international alternative/community journalism of its kind for the Western Hemisphere. Journalists from throughout the Americas and from Cuba's extensive network of community journalists took part. Representatives of the Peoples Video Network were among the attendees from the United States.

Many delegates at the conference had not known about each other, even when they were from the same country. Many of the Argentineans, for example, did not know each other at the beginning of the conference-but they ended the conference as a tight-knit group.

The journalists work in various struggles in their countries. Video Machepa, from the Dominican Republic, puts a camera on the street and records people's discussions in the poorest quarters of Santo Domingo. The tapes are edited and replayed on the street.

The delegates from Colombia face a government that bars them from using radio or video at all.

Most of the alternative journalists at the conference suffer from government restrictions or lack of funding. There is Tony, who videotapes the homeless on the streets of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Noel, in Canada, calls his radio show "The Voice of the Voiceless" in honor of Mumia Abu-Jamal. There are the Argentineans who use alternative media to remember the disappeared.

These journalists want to reach the people with something other than the regurgitated lies of the bourgeois media. They want to give the people back their own voice.

A Cuban, Rigoberto, told of carrying his video monitors up the Sierra Maestra on the backs of horses and burros.

In a plenary talk, Jose Dos Santos, vice president of the Cuban Journalists' Union, said that when you broadcast the truth the people will listen. Although the imperialist press has technical superiority and the capacity to encompass the globe, the alternative press, focused on people's needs, will become more popular, he said.

Workshops divided according to medium: newspaper, radio or video. At the video workshop, Ellen Andors of PVN presented a paper on the role of activist media. She also described PVN and showed some of its videos.

Workshop participants especially enjoyed watching a videotape of Workers World Party presidential candidate Monica Moorehead claiming the floor at a third-party debate that was broadcast live in October on the C-Span network in the United States.

At the final plenary, a PVN representative had the honor of reading a resolution by the U.S. delegates, condemning the Helms-Burton Act. This was greeted with thunderous applause.

The delegates resolved to meet again next year in Rosario, Argentina.

On a field trip to Video Havana's community TV station, conference participants saw how the people use community television as a forum to discuss issues of concern. Not a marginal avenue of communication like public-access cable television is in the United States, community TV in Cuba is a central means to carry out social change.

[The writer was a People's Video Network representative at the conference.]

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