There are more than two dozen independent journalists in the Cuban gulag, and reporters and editors on the outside are regularly harassed, and worse, by the secret police. Being an independent journalist in Cuba is not exactly a low-risk job.
So how have Elio Miguel Boza, Ada Olimpia Becerra and a few other journalists have chosen to respond to the oppression?
They have started a new news agency, Escambray Press.
They have not been scared into silence by the dictatorship.
They have been emboldened to take action.
Based in Santa Clara, the goal of the agency will be to tell the stories the government would prefer not be told, according to a story by independent journalist Guillermo Fariñas, posted at CubaNet.
Boza is the agency's director and Becerra, the editor-in-chief. Others signed on to edit for Escambray Press are Liset Zamora, Noel Cuéllar, Olga Lilia González and Judith Eloisa Hernández.
The agency's honorary president is Arturo Pérez de Alejo Rodríguez, a human rights activist arrested during the "black spring" of March-April 2003, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The journalists have to know they possibly share the same fate, and not just because of what happened to Pérez de Alejo.
Another imprisoned journalist, Raimundo Perdigón Brito, last fall was arrested and sentenced to 4 years in jail, just a few weeks after his his sister and a few others started the Yayabo Press agency.
Being an independent Cuban journalist in Cuba is dangerous work, but time after time, as Jay Nordlinger noted in March, the profession attracts some of the nation's bravest and boldest patriots, committed to telling the real stories of their country and helping lead it to freedom. With these proud and courageous men and women on the side of liberty, Cuba cannot lose.
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