The Poet and the Despot

The Washington Post ^ | May 18, 2003 | Staff

[Luis Gonzalez]

RAUL RIVERO, Cuba's foremost independent journalist and one of its best poets, knew for years that he could be arrested at any moment by Fidel Castro's police, simply because he dared to report and write freely about his country. But he refused to be intimidated. "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," he wrote in 1999. "Nobody can make me feel like a criminal, an enemy target or a turncoat. . . . I am merely a man who writes. One who writes in the country where I was born."

[Luis Gonzalez]

"Mr. Rivero can't speak up anymore -- he's locked up in the Ciego de Avila prison, some 300 miles south of Havana -- but an article he published a year ago offers a good answer. "The truth is that ordinary Cubans are more oppressed by a personal embargo, one that has transformed them into blindfolded and muzzled pawns," observed the poet. "In reality, Cubans want to remove the inequalities that exist between the people and their leaders before they deal with the problems between their country and the United States."

Good Lord!

The Washington Post gets one (basically) right?

[Consort]

Castro is Red
Cubans are Blue
Have a cigar
I'll roll one for you.

[marron]

I have met guys like Rivero, you meet them all the time among the Cuban emigres, and I am always struck by the moral weight and presence of these otherwise very normal men. The empty-left in this country libles them as economic refugees, but these are not the men that I have met, often educated men who gave up good positions to be here, who by the time they finally got their visa out had spent years being harrassed, jailed, fired from their jobs, some spending years in work camps away from home just for wanting to live like a normal human being. The average Cuban you meet on the street corner has paid a price to be here.

They have a lot in common, in that respect, with our war veterans. Most of us say we believe the things we believe. Some men have had to stake their lives on it. It changes them.

[Alamo-Girl]

Wow! Thanks for the heads up!

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

The Washington Post gets one (basically) right?

Amazing. Sniff....thank you for the ping, Luis. AP next?

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!