Fidel's Kind of Freedom

During his first year as Cuba's boss, Premier Fidel Castro has made it increasingly plain to visiting newsmen that they are working on borrowed time. Non-Cuban correspondents, writing the truth about Cuba as they see it, have been harried: the Chicago Tribune's Jules Dubois (see below), after switching from praise to criticism of Castro, was refused food, drink, and haircuts in Havana, finally hounded right out of Cuba; James Buchanan of the Miami Herald was banished from the island after being convicted of conspiracy against Castro's regime (TIME, Jan. 4). Last week Castro's campaign against the outside press picked up intensity along two fronts.

Havana-based foreign correspondents were subjected to a new barrage of vituperation and abuse, from hotel waiters, bellhops, elevator operators, customs officials, and anonymous midnight callers on the telephone. Some Cuban concerns began stamping their mail with hostile messages to the press: IF YOU READ IT IN THE A.P. OR THE U.P.I., IT'S A LIE.

The wire services were the target in another phase of the attack. Last week at a meeting of Havana's Provincial Newspaper Guild, Guild President Baldomiro Rios, a fervent Castro disciple, issued a special resolution. Hereafter, proclaimed Rios, any wire-agency story that lied about Castro (meaning put him in a bad light) would, if it appeared in any Cuban paper, be followed by this rider: "This wire story is published voluntarily by this newspaper, making legitimate use of the press freedom existing in Cuba. But newspapermen and graphic workers of this work center express, using that same right, their opinion that the contents of the story are not in conformity with the truth or to the most elemental ethics of journalism." At week's end no Cuban newspaper had dared to publish a story that called for the rider.

Since he has not actually seized any publications, Dictator Castro has fooled many with the claim that his government has not impaired freedom of the press. But the constantly growing campaign of harassment has had its effect on the generally docile Cuban journalists and has served notice on those from abroad. Perhaps the most ominous aspect: the pattern of workers' protests is strikingly similar to the way in which the Communists began their subjugation of the press in China.

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