I N T E R V I E W S

Nestor Baguer
Who believes in the myth
 of independent journalism?
BY PEDRO DE LA HOZ—Granma daily staff writer—

"JOURNALISM? Independent? Listen, it’s neither one thing nor the other. That is an untenable story." There’s not the slightest shadow of a doubt in the mind of Néstor Baguer, an old colleague whom Juventud Rebelde readers from the 1980s will remember for his column "En defensa del idioma."

Néstor Baguer narrates  his experiences as an  ‘independent’ journalist. ‘Independent journalists’  workshop installed in the  U.S. Interests Section.

And no one knows this fact better than he does. An undercover agent for the State Security Forces since 1960, and now 81 years old, he was the given the mission of taking the initiative in this area at the beginning of the 1990s. This was prompted by a notorious counterrevolutionary ringleader suggesting to him the possibility of stimulating the flow of tendentious information to the U.S. media, particularly to the radio station that insultingly adopts the name of José Martí and the lucrative anti-Castro industry located in Florida.

"This man spoke with me," Baguer recounts in great detail, "one day when I dropped in on him at home to discover for myself the inner sanctum of the "human rights" activists. I went under the pretext of eating and drinking the copious provisions he was supplied with by a European diplomat aligned to U.S. political subversion. News of the founding of the Association of Independent Cuban Journalists had barely been spread when the first volunteers began to appear."

Look, that is one of the many myths that permeate the history of the so-called internal opposition. Including myself, just about five of them were journalists. The rest of them were upstarts, many of them without the slightest cultural training. I even knew of the case of one of them who spoke, if it could be described as such, with grammatical errors.

We both know than any serious analysis — which those proclaiming alleged freedom of expression are not capable of — has to take into account that there is not one press organ anywhere in the world that doesn’t take sides, whether for ideas or for commercial imperatives. They know that if a journalist strays too far from the editorial line of the owners, they’re out of the game; they have to leave and take their ideas somewhere else. But in this case, the dependency is obvious. Dependency, subordination, and genuflection to U.S. political interests or influential people in Miami, it’s the same thing: everything’s like that. In my testimony to the judges, I told of how the U.S. Interests Section, as much to me as to other agencies and groups, advised us on the subject matter. And I’ll tell you something else: I know that before sending their articles abroad, many of them consulted down to the smallest details of their work.

When certain unscrupulous people see an opportunity to make easy money or the chance of finding a way to leave the country, they go crazy. Anyone can start up an agency and they just mushroomed.

Of course there was. Both inside and outside. They stabbed each other in the back. One lady in southwest Miami who invented the Cubanet website began to receive the information we were sending her from a telephone in her kitchen. In less than two years, she’d moved into a chic neighborhood, with a beautiful apartment and another she used as an office. And she wangled a $90,000 car for herself.

It almost always came from The National Endowment for Democracy. The losses started from there on down.

One of absolute trust. I had a permanent entry pass. I became very close to the bosses of the Interests Section and those in the Press and Culture department. The most aggressive of all of them is James Cason. He thinks he’s a proconsul, an emperor. Another one who’s just as bad is the current head of the Press and Culture Department, Gonzalo Gallegos who, in his heart of hearts, doesn’t want to be Hispanic; they both despise us.

Do you think that these trials against individuals who moving in the orbit of the Interests Section are directed against the Cuban intelligentsia and Cuban ideas?

These people have nothing to do with Cuban ideas and culture. I already said so during the trials: they are mercenaries. They’ll do anything and say whatever foolish thing for money. One sad case is that of Raúl Rivero because he really was a journalist and a very talented poet. But he was morally bankrupt and lowered himself to the level of the others. What I feel most proud of is that I have contributed something to the preservation of my homeland’s culture. Because what they have tried to do through their subversive activities is to supplant our culture, and culminate the long-held U.S. annexationist plan of taking over Cuba.

I’ll carry on writing, now that I’m free from the ties of my underground work. I’ve already started to write a book that will be called Octavio, my memoirs of working underground. And I’ll see if I can publish a selection of poems by Gustavo Sánchez Galarraga, an uncle of mine who was a legendary figure in Cuban bohemian circles.