A New Beginning for “Letters from Cuba”

Fernando Ravsberg*

HAVANA TIMES — Today marks the last post of Cartas desde Cuba (“Letters from Cuba”) you will read in BBC Mundo (in Spanish). From now on, those interested in continuing to debate about the island’s reality will be able to do so through my personal webpage, www.cartasdesdecuba.com, [and here on Havana Times].

On March 13, for the first time in 7 years, the staff of BBC Mundo asked me to change some things in my post La paja en el ojo ajeno (“The Mote in Another’s Eyes”). I didn’t agree with their editorial comments and so my colleagues in London and Miami decided not to publish it.

The following week, I was informed my personal blog would cease to be published and I was invited to take part in a different blog project on Cuba. After analyzing their proposal, I concluded it was neither professional nor interesting for me and I declined the invitation.

My Years with BBC Mundo

It’s been a long, seven-year journey – nearly 400 posts in which I have tried to portray Cuban reality beyond the anecdotic, attempting to bring my readers closer to a context one must know in order to understand a reality as uncommon as this one.

I chose to expose my readers to the opinions, hopes and frustrations of common Cubans, that majority that tends to be silent, because it is seldom or never consulted by the press, even though it is an essential part of every project developed in the country.

We tried to get to the bottom of the crime committed at the psychiatric hospital in Havana, where around thirty patients died of hunger and exposure. We warned readers it was something that could happen again and we were the only journalistic space that published the comments of the victims’ relatives.

In this connection, we also often addressed corruption and, to confront the phenomenon, we even interviewed a corrupt official, sometime before she was imprisoned, in order to give voice to her points of view and justifications.

We didn’t only target the low-ranking corrupt officials, however. We had no qualms about publishing a post to denounce more far-reaching corruption incidents, such as the case involving Cuba’s commercial airline company Cubana de Aviacion, which cost a general his position and landed his wife in prison.

The role of the bureaucracy, Cuba’s most tenacious plague, of its inefficiency and the forms of corruption that hide behind it, was a recurrent issue on this blog – not gratuitously, or because of some personal score I wanted to settle, but because I consider it one of the greatest burdens on Cuban society, much heavier than what we find in other countries, no doubt.

Finding a Balance at the BBC

Not all of my posts were critical, however. We also wrote unreservedly of Cuba’s achievements, of its low infant mortality rates, of its free and open educational system and of its Civil Defense mechanisms, likely the most efficient in the world. The post I remember most fondly, however, is the one about Cuban women.

We questioned the legality of the US embargo / blockade, the double standards used to gage human rights and democracy in Cuba and Saudi Arabia, the Guantanamo Naval Base and the financing of Cuban opposition groups with tens of millions of dollars every year.

From both ends of the political spectrum, I was always criticized for throwing “six of one and half a dozen of the other” into the mix. They saw it as a journalistic strategy or a survival mechanism, when, in fact, it was nothing other than a sincere reflection of daily life on the island.

On the contrary, this space was never “politically correct.” We never did what was expected of us or what was in our best interests to do. We assessed the weaknesses of dissidents with the same intensity with which we pointed out press censorship and the low incomes of Cuban doctors.

I recall that, when we criticized the opposition, we were showered with harsh accusations and that, later, we found out the US diplomatic chief in Cuba had suggested that the State Department read us in order to understand the real situation in Cuba. He did this in a secret cable revealed by Wikileaks.

Our work did not go unnoticed. Cartas desde Cuba was, until its last post, the blog with the largest number of readers and comments in all of BBC Mundo – which is why I intend to continue writing it, as a personal project on my own page.
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(*) A Havana Times translation of the original posted  in Spanish by BBC Mundo.