Word: castros
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Shortly after his arrival in Cuba, the Associated Press's Daniel Harker encountered Fidel Castro at a reception in the French embassy. "Why did they ever send you to Havana?" asked Castro. Marker's answer was blunt and honest. "I guess the A.P. thought I was expendable," he said. Four years after Castro's revolution sealed the island from nosy newsmen, only three Western correspondents - all wire service men - remain on duty in Havana...
...eight months in Havana, Yves Doude, who represents the French wire service Agence France-Presse, is convinced that things were easier in his previous assignment in Communist Rumania. The other resident Western newsman in Havana, Alan Oxley of Britain's Reuters, Ltd., has been arrested 19 times since Castro took power...
...Unless Havana's myriad censors slip up, these three men send out nothing that Castro does not approve of. Their dispatches are limited almost entirely to government communiqués and the anti-American salvos fired in perfect unison by Castro's captive Havana press. Although Castro keeps up the fiction that there is no press censorship, the Western newsmen know otherwise. Cables are often held up for days or forever; the Western Union office, staffed by Cubans, will not even acknowledge that a message has been sent, much less received. "Some times," says Harker, "not even...
Telephone calls to the outer world are technically possible but unrewarding. So many of Castro's minions tap into the line that the connection at the far end often becomes inaudible. Pre-arranged codes do not help. "You know that hardware I was telling you about?" said Daniel Harker on such a call. "Well, it's shifting." He was cut off in midsentence, and his report on troop movements did not get through. Once, after trying vainly to get half a dozen numbers in the U.S., Harker's predecessor bellowed in exasperation: "You mean to say that...
Airport officials, for example, say they do not know the departure time of planes. No one but Premier Castro will confirm anything - and the Premier does not grant audiences to the correspondents. A.F.-P.'s Doude has set eyes on Castro only three times and has yet to talk...