Our Man in Miami

The once-free Cuban press, like all institutions under Castro, is now only an unprotesting spoke in the grinding wheel of the regime. So far, seven newspapers have been shut down or expropriated; the rest are under government yoke. For uncensored news a growing number of Cubans this week were listening to an underground voice from the distance: a Cuban press-in-exile composed of three formerly leading Havana dailies, now written in Miami by refugee newsmen and smuggled back into Cuba through ingenious clandestine channels.

P: Diario de la Marina claims quick distribution, parachuting weekly copies from planes which must not only evade U.S. patrols but the Cuban air force too. Diario, reputedly the oldest Spanish-language paper in the hemisphere, is dropped into Cuba two days after publication in a 12-in. by 6-in. packet, tightly folded so as to resist the wind. About 5.000 copies of the two-color, 20-24 page tabloid are sold in Miami; 2,500 go to Cuba by parachute and other means as the gift of Editor Jose Ignacio Rivero and the twelve-man staff who fled for their lives when the paper was taken over last May. Regarded as the unofficial spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church in Cuba, Diario still has the most powerful potential influence of the anti-Castro press.

P: Avance, shuttered by the regime in January, prints 10,000 copies of a 6-in. by 9-in. miniature of a handsome, slick-paper tabloid, which are sneaked into Cuba by volunteer travelers, fishing boats, and roundabout from South America and Europe through unwatched commercial mails. Editor Jorge Zayas, aggressive heir to a publishing dynasty and grandson of a former President of Cuba, plans to add Miami social notes to the paper's steady diet of Cuban colony news. Although an estimated 7,500 copies of Avance reach Cuba every week (at least 2,500 are confiscated or dumped by fearful agents), Zayas cannot estimate the actual readership because, he reports, some copies have found their way back to Miami so read, reread and worn out that they seem almost a transparent sheet of Scotch tape. There is speculation over Avance's glossy finances, but Zayas insists that he has no big angel, that the paper is breaking even on advertising.

P: El Mundo, owned by the multimillionaire clan of Amadeo H. Barletta (U.S. investments, expropriated Cuban TV stations, G.M. distributorship), dispatches some of its 2,000 copies under "official" sponsorship: sailors in Castro's coast guard, restive under the dictatorship, smuggle in the twelve-page, heavily illustrated standard-size paper. Other copies reach their destination by private boat nd through the diplomatic pouch of anti-Castro governments. The eight-column paper (circ. 11,000) is varityped in Miami, sent to New Jersey for printing, then flown back to Miami. Of El Mundo's staff of 25, only four or five are actually reporters. One regular beat: Miami's International Airport, where hundreds of Cuban refugees arrive daily with more notes for the underground.

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