By Carola Guerrero*
The Cuban government appointed new editors for its two main newspapers, Granma and Juventud Rebelde, describing the move as part of a “renewal” process to improve the country’s official press, BBC News reported.
Granma is the Communist Party’s main daily and Juventud Rebelde is its youth-oriented publication. According to BBC, Granma’s new editor Pelayo Terry – Juventud Rebelde’s former editor – is less of a hardliner than his predecessor Lazaro Barrero. Marina Menendez replaced Terry at Juventud Rebelde.
Earlier this month, Cuban officials replaced Barrero, the editor of Granma for the last eight years, as a step toward the “new type of journalism” proposed during the Ninth Congress of the Union of Journalists and Writers in Cuba (UPEC). During the congress, politicians called for a more transparent and less self-censored type of journalism.
“If I’m going to be honest with you, after this congress we can no longer continue doing the same press,” said Julio Acanda, a journalist with the country’s official press, to Radio Marti in a Sept. 5 interview on some of the initiatives discussed during the congress. “A very encouraging environment has remained.”
The changes were announced shortly before Cuban authorities briefly arrested five dissident journalists ten days ago.
And two months after UPEC’s Ninth Congress, Cuba rejected several UN recommendations on freedom of expression, including, “guaranteeing freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, as well as the free activity of human rights defenders, independent journalists and those in opposition of the government,” according to Notimex.
Cuban President Raul Castro has described official press coverage as "triumphalist," focusing on positive reports about the economy and official visits.
In 2012 the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Cuba as the ninth most censored country in the world. Cuba is also amongst the top three most repressive countries regarding Internet freedom, according to Freedom House.
*Carola Guerrero is a student in the class "Reporting Latin America" at the University of Texas at Austin.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
