Here in Havana, and indeed
in the whole of Cuba, there is only one daily newspaper, and it normally
consists of eight thin pages, except when Fidel Castro makes a speech, at which
time the country's paper shortage is momentarily overlooked. From Tuesday to
Saturday, the publication is called Granma , the official organ of the
Communist Party, named for that overcrowded boat in which Castro crossed to
Cuba from Mexico in 1956. Sunday it is called Rebelde ("Rebel Youth")
and run by the Union of Young Communists. Monday it is called
Trabajadores ("Workers") and run by the Communist trade union movement.
Rebelde is said to have a rather lighter touch than Granma and
Trabajadores to be even grimmer, but the editorial lines of all three
are identical, handed down by Castro himself. For a brief period, these papers
were printed on recycled sugar cane, but this gave them the texture and color
of a stiff brown paper bag and was abandoned in favor of recycled paper. Last
Saturday, Granma announced on its front page that Cuba's "National
Festival for the Recycling of Primary Materials" would be shown live on
television from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Granma is one of the few traditional Communist Party newspapers left in
the world, imbued with irrepressible optimism about the prospects for the sugar
harvest and for the Cuban economy in general as the country limps along in the
economic misery that it calls, on Castro's insistence, "The Special Period in
Peacetime." Among several cheerful sugar stories in the last few days was one
accentuating the positive aspect of recent flooding in the countryside. While
this would set back the sugar harvest, Granma said, it would also make
sugar cane easier to plant.
Favorite topics of the paper are, of course, the
shortcomings of capitalism in general and the United States in particular, with
much attention paid to racism in the United States, violence and drugs in U.S.
schools, and corruption in the U.S. government. This week's anti-American
stories included a full-pager Wednesday headlined "Once Again Cuba Doesn't
Lie," about a belated CIA admission in the Los Angeles Times that Thomas Willard Ray, shot down over
Cuba in an American fighter bomber in 1961, was on a covert CIA mission. Castro
kept Ray's body deep-frozen for 18 years before allowing it to be sent home for
burial. Tuesday, under the headline "It's the CIA Again," Granma
reprinted from an Ecuadorian newspaper an article accusing the CIA of murder,
torture, state terrorism, and other crimes.
Since the
airing on Cuban television of an American documentary on the threat to the
world of a wandering asteroid, Granma has been obsessed with the
asteroid danger, which it accuses the United States of understating. This week
it supported Russian scientists' predictions of "apocalyptic collisions" in the
years 2004, 2006, and 2010 against NASA's reassuring one that the world should
survive until at least 2028.
Granma regularly makes favorable comparisons
between Cuba's human rights record and the United States'. U.S. policy has been
determined by wrong American ideas about political democracy, it maintains.
Last Saturday, its main front page headline read: "The First Human Right Is the
Right to Live as a Human Being. Cuba Will Continue Fighting, Resisting, and
Winning for as Long as Necessary." (Since then, Granma 's front page has
led, for three days in a row, with the activities in Havana of the visiting
prime minister of St. Kitts, Denzil Douglas.)
An
ancient alleged example of U.S. contempt for human rights was the dispersal in
1961 of three identical Long Island, New York, triplets to see how they would
grow up separately. This story was published in Granma this week under
the headline "Monstrous Experiment." The lifting by the United States of some
of its anti-Cuba restrictions was reported briefly by Granma on an
inside page and was the subject of no editorial comment either then or
subsequently.
Granma boasted on last Saturday's front page that the
Web site of its international
edition--this is published weekly in French, Spanish, German, and
Portuguese--has been visited by 1 million people in 60 days, a surge of
interest it attributed to the pope's recent visit to Cuba and the return of Che
Guevara's bones from Bolivia. But the paper also deplored the "cultural
domination" of the Internet by the United States and Europe.
Granma specializes in historical anniversaries, finding one to celebrate
almost every day, even if sometimes on a date that is fairly distant from the
real one. In the past few days, it has published long articles on 1) the death
in 1957 of a member of the Cuban underground; 2) a speech made 120 years ago by
Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo; 3) a decade-old Cuban victory in Angola; and
4) the 95 th birthday of the late Julio Mella, the founder of the
Cuban Communist Party.
It has a weekly medical advice column, of which
the last two subjects have been pancreatitis and optical neuritis, and an
occasional books column that, this week, discussed a book titled The
Immortal Body , an anthology of erotic letters, in a review that began,
"Sexuality, sensuality, passion, and pleasure have always been the main
preoccupation of young Cuban writers."
The newspaper publishes just
one letter a week from a reader, always with an editorial riposte at the
bottom. This week's was from a woman and had to do with the desperate attempts
that she and her fiance made to find somewhere to eat in Havana on the evening
of Valentine's Day. They tried more than a half-dozen restaurants and pizza
parlors and found them variously full, out of food, closed for lack of water
for washing up, and charging one-eighth of a month's salary for a single pizza.
But they persevered, she said, "firm and optimistic" in their search, until
they were finally allowed by a packed restaurant to eat their dinner off the
floor. They were lucky enough, she said, to find a bus quickly and be back home
in time to watch the Saturday night movie.
The comment at the bottom of
this letter said the newspaper had decided to omit the names of the restaurants
concerned, "because they wouldn't be known by respectable people outside the
neighborhood," and made no comment on the facilities they lacked. Instead it
congratulated the couple on the courage and optimism that had enabled them in
the end to triumph: "You got home in time to see the film, so it really wasn't
such a bad day."
