Posted on 05/19/2003 7:08:25 AM PDT by 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
"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?
Amazing. Sniff....thank you for the ping, Luis. AP next?
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