Cuba’s Alarcón speaks to journalists in Miami

Ricardo Alarcón

It was meant to be a trap. The head of Cuba’s National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcón, was invited to speak by satellite hookup on June 14 to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which was meeting in Miami. He was questioned by New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito, who left Cuba with her family in the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

From her very first question— “Why do you continue to suppress freedom of the press in Cuba?”—the interviewer’s hostility was apparent.

But Alarcón had no trouble showing that Cuba is not the repressive dictatorship that the exile community in the United States has painted it to be. And he cited CIA sources to describe how the U.S. government has been trying to bring about “regime change” in Cuba ever since the revolution.

To the right-wing claim that Cuba has jailed 24 journalists, Alarcón said the people mentioned were arrested not for writing or expressing views different from the government’s but because they were U.S. agents. He then referred to CIA documents declassified in 1997 that describe the agency’s Cuba Project, sometimes called Operation Mongoose, which began in 1961.

The documents give “fascinating details on money spent paying journalists in Cuba and South Florida,” said Alarcón. “Cuba has been subjected to a ‘propaganda offensive,’ to use the CIA’s own words,” he added.

These details are described in the book “The Cuba Project: CIA Covert Oper a tions 1959-62,” published by Ocean Press.

Referring to those working for the United States in its long history of invasions, blockade and subversion against Cuba, Alarcón said: “They’re dependent on the foreign power that has tried to destroy our country. We have the right to defend ourselves.”

He also pointed out that, while “hordes of journalists have been killed in Latin America and other places” in recent years, not one journalist has been killed in Cuba since the U.S.-supported Batista regime was overthrown in 1959.

To a question about why, with Cuba’s new trade deals with China and Vene zuela, the U.S. embargo should still matter, Alarcón replied that, even though the world is changing, Cuba “still has to sell and buy—for example, parts for some medical equipment come only from the United States. ... The embargo forces us to pay more for what we buy.”

Cuba knows that if a U.S. company merges with or buys out a firm from another country, it will cancel any commercial contracts that firm had with Cuba.

Even with the blockade, however, the Cuban economy is improving. Alarcón said housing is now a priority for the government, which is building more than 100,000 new housing units this year.

Ojito accused Cuba of keeping its people from getting on the Internet. Alarcón replied that the embargo contains specific laws restricting Cuban access to the Internet, which was first developed by the Pentagon. However, he added, every single classroom in Cuba, even in remote mountain areas, has computers for the students.

Another question implied that Cuba’s efforts to build socialism were a failure and that emigration to the United States is increasing. Alarcón pointed out that before the revolution, in 1958, Cuba was second only to Mexico in the number of people who emigrated to the United States. In recent years that has been declining in relation to other countries in the area, even though, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans are automatically admitted to the United States if they put a foot on its soil.

“What would happen if there was a Dominican Adjustment Act or Mexican or Haitian?,” he asked, adding that tens of millions more from Latin America and the Caribbean would flock to the United States because of the vast inequality of wealth in this hemisphere.

Alarcón’s effectiveness in explaining his country’s positions to an audience formerly closed to Cuban representatives may explain why the New York Times still has not written about this event even though its own reporter was involved.

However, a link to an audio of the exchange can be found in the online version of “Cuba’s Alarcón blames U.S. for jailings” in the June 15 Miami Herald.