
Juan Mario Rodríguez Guillén
For all our griping about low pay and long hours, American journalists have it easy. After all, very rarely do the words we write, buy us the threat of prison time.
If only we were so bold, then we would be justified in calling a journalist like Juan Mario Rodríguez Guillén our colleague.
Rodríguez Guillén was arrested last week, after police officers caught him distributing copies of an article in which he denounced national "elections," this past Sunday, according to Misceláneas de Cuba.
Rodríguez, a correspondent for the Sweden-based Web site, was detained on Jan. 18.
"They sent me to a cell, where for four hours they took my fingerprints and my picture. A State Security official subjected me to an interrogation, interested in knowing if I had been directed by any foreign embassy to distribute copies of the article," Rodríguez told his colleage, independent journalist Carlos Serpa Maceira. "I was threatened that if I continued my work as an independent communicator, I would be jailed.
"I reaffirm that I will continue writing, and pay whatever price."
The role of a journalist, whether in a free society like ours or in a totalitarian state like Cuba, is to speak truth to power — to question, to cajole, to challenge those in charge, on behalf of our readers, of our fellow citizens. In the United States, the First Amendment guards us, although not always absolutely, a protection that reflects our importance to the republic.
In Cuba, brave men and women like Rodríguez, have no such protections. The words they write — at any times, on the whim of a police captain or someone above him in the food chain — could be their ticket to jail. They know the risks — more than two dozen of their colleagues are already imprisoned — yet they persist.
They question, they cajole, they challenge the illegitmate powers who for almost 50 years have enslaved their country — whatever the price.
They labor in relative obscurity but in many ways, their work is much more honorable than what is produced by many journalists in the United States, journalists who have forgotten that the most valuable privilege of our profession is that we get to speak to truth to power.
To learn how it's done right, all we have to do is to look to our Cuban colleagues.
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