[NYTr] A Cuban Broadcaster in Miami Faces Down the Old Censorship Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 04:17:28 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit [A very interesting column on a radio and TV personality who left Cuba in 2000, ended up in Miami facing down, and so far triumphing over, the mediocrity and bigotry in the US media -- despite typical right-wing Miami intimidation and censorship. His ratings show that the Cuban-American community, like the rest of the US population, is well ahead of their politicians and the old gusano goons those political hacks serve.] Progreso Weekly - Jun 14, 2007 http://www.progresoweekly.com/index.php?progreso=Ramy&otherweek=1181797200 Dateline Havana "Yet it Moves" By Manuel Alberto Ramy "Yet it moves," Galileo said, centuries ago, addressing the Inquisition. They could condemn him, but the evidence was before everyone. Today, in the 21st Century, in the U.S. city of Miami, Edmundo Garcia, host of the program "The Night Moves," can say the same to his inquisitors. Garcia, a self-taught man, arrived in Miami in May 2000. He was a media man. In his native Cuba he hosted, among other radio programs, "People of Their Word," which, he says, "was a breath of fresh air" because of its uninhibited, direct and pointed style while interviewing major personalities in Cuban culture," he told me in an interview held via the Internet. But "without any explanation they stopped the program" because "apparently it was not pleasing to some functionaries in the [Communist] Party, one of them being Aldana," who at the time was the third-ranking official in the political hierarchy and the party's chief ideologue. On Cuban TV, he shared programs with the great hosts, such as German Pinelli and Cepero Brito, among others. Later, with Maria Victoria Gil, he hosted -- for 13 years -- "From the Big Stage," a program with cultural expectations "that brought me great popularity, but that didn't allow me to be myself. Its producers were too rigid for my taste, and often I slipped out of the script." Garcia had his audience in his pocket, but there were also some personal problems and insatisfactions. So, he took a plane bound for London and from that city flew to Miami. "Why did I leave? I keep asking myself that question. Many times it hurts me. Maybe in the previous lines, the reader will find an answer, maybe none. Maybe I never left." But he did leave, with his suitcase full of ideas about how to do journalism, radio and TV programs. Edmundo Garcia in Miami Once in Miami, he worked with undeniable success. Same on TV, where he began on Channel 41, AmericaTV, as a reporter. Also on Channel 23, on radio station WQBA 1140 (a Univision station), where he began his program "Strangers in the Night," of a cultural nature. But his journalistic style, the unusual focus on current events (both on the screen and on radio) increased not only the number of listeners and watchers but also the hostility and the hatred of extremists and their spokesmen in the media. When he devoted his "Strangers in the Night" program to the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, Radio Mambi and other stations began a campaign "accusing me of being a communist because I condemned his execution by Franco, because I devoted two hours to a communist poet and playwright who also happened to be gay." Miami's extremist sector practices terrorism and homophobia with equal enthusiasm. At Channel 41, he met naked and blunt censorship. At one time, he filmed a diatribe delivered by Delfin Gonzalez -- grand-uncle of the famous boy Elian Gonzalez -- where Gonzalez accused the family's publicist, Armando Gutierrez, of swindling the family "over the copyright of a book about the boy." A quick-thinking Garcia went to Gutierrez, who "became very angry and said I couldn't broadcast that because 'it would help Castro.'" After engaging in "an argument that we filmed," Gutierrez and Gonzalez went to Channel 41's headquarters, where director Omar Romay "took the tapes from my cameraman and unashamedly cancelled the story." Under attack, with his programs shunted to less-listened-to schedules (one of the ways used to stifle well-listened-to voices), dismissed and rehired by other stations and channels, Garcia allowed his quality to impose itself. In 2003, the weekly New Times designated him as Best Personality; in 2005, he won the Emmy for his television series. What was unacceptable to the extreme right and the controllers of the media in "the capital of exiledom" was Garcia's interview in New York with the president of the Cuban National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon de Quesada, an assignment done "within the standards of the best tradition of U.S. journalism," which were very far from the ideologized standards in Miami. To make things worse, in December of 2006, Garcia traveled to Cuba (with the permission of the U.S. Treasury Department) to visit his grandfather, who died weeks after Garcia returned to Florida. A few months ago, "The Night Moves" premiered on radio station 1210 AM, 9-10 p.m., a difficult time slot because it competes with major TV programs. However, Garcia's program has been a hit. What was the miracle? "I am a communicator. God gave me the gift of gab, but every day I demand and give more honesty, even if it hurts. And when it hurts, I give more [honesty] so it can hurt some more," he says. Another factor of his success is "the mediocrity that controls the media," which "do not follow the rules of good journalism. If they challenged the established power, if Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch were presented as terrorists, I wouldn't stick out so much." This opinion, which is true, is insufficient. The key is that Garcia, along with two journalists who preceded him, reflects the new social composition in South Florida, the new interests and the change of attitudes regarding the relation of Cuban-Americans and the island. He reflects the opinions of 55.2 percent of those who want to travel to the island to visit relatives and friends without the restrictions imposed by the Bush administration in 2004, dictated to satisfy the so-called historic exile (the extremist sector) that controls the media and the political opinions expressed. Garcia, who left but "never left," is part of the more recent groups of emigres. According to a poll by Florida International University (FIU, 2007), 67.1 percent of those who arrived in the U.S. between 1985 and 1994 want the restrictions lifted. That position is stronger among the more newly arrived groups. The new reality has consequences for the political control of the county and the contribution of voters to the status-quo. The essence is whether the pioneers in these positions -- Francisco Aruca, the first in the early 1990s with his radio program "Yesterday in Miami" and later Max Lesnik -- promoted a change in the opinions and attitudes. Like them, Edmundo Garcia, starting from the new reality and the new human component, reinforces that change. Worse still for the extremists: the human factor expressed in the right to travel without restrictions is the political turning point for institutions and personalities, such as Joe Garcia, former executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and current chairman of the county's Democratic Party, who recently said he was "in agreement with the fact that Cubans should be able to travel to Cuba" and added that the restrictions have been "possibly the worst mistake Washington has ever committed." On his program, Edmundo Garcia has interviewed Vicky Huddleston, former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, who favored a review of U.S. policy toward Cuba. The opinions of these two interviewees, like the opinions of others, are a clear example of a job of reaffirmation of opinions and attitudes. The reader should note that, while it's true that in terms of communication the current stage in the alternative media is that of reinforcing attitudes, an article by journalist Ana Menendez recently published in The Miami Herald was never published in El Nuevo Herald, precisely because it also serves for the strengthening of the new states of opinion. The extremists' reaction: the Mafia The extreme right, ideologically an orphan, inquisitorial because it's dogmatic and dogmatic because it needs to control society, has directed the methods utilized by the Mafia against Garcia's program. If we remember any movie about gangsters -- from the B movies to the Oscar winners -- we see that pressure and threats are the gangsters' stock in trade. Do you remember the scene in The Godfather II when capo Fanucci charged "protection" to the neighborhood merchants? To refuse to pay for "protection" would mean bankruptcy for the merchant -- if not outright assassination. Many readers are unaware that between 1975 and 1976 more than 100 bombs exploded in Miami and one assassination was committed every week, as reported by journalist Dick Russell in Miami New Times (Oct. 29, 1976) in a story titled "The Kingdom of Terror in Little Havana." Almost all of those acts of terrorism and murder were due to the vendetta among the Cuban Mafias for economic and political control of Little Havana. It was not the creation of Mario Puzo; it was a reality show of crime. Times have passed and the Mafia has other methods. Fanucci's collections have been replaced by telephone calls from important political personalities or by "friendly visitors" to the advertisers in Garcia's program who "recommend" that the advertisers withdraw their commercials. The visits are convincing. Of course they are; the reality show was applied selectively in the 1980s with Molotov cocktails thrown at the home of academician Maria Cristina Herrera, or with bombs set at one of the companies that arranges for charter flights to Cuba, such as the one that sponsors Francisco Aruca's program "Yesterday in Miami." This Mafia, although on a downhill slide, has pressured several of the advertisers in "The Night Moves," because they know that their visitors, although they wear white shirts, carry C-4 in the soles of their shoes and keep weapons of all kinds in their refrigerators. All that needs to be done is to defrost them. If it weren't for that terror "I would have about 12 commercials today," Garcia says. "I ended up with only three. Two more have signed up, but we'll see if they stay, because they're being intimidated." However, the pressures on his program have a contrary effect, as they did in the cases of Francisco Aruca's "Yesterday in Miami" and Max Lesnik's "Radio Miami." The levels of audience from the majority of Cubans who want to maintain contact with their relatives have increased. And all three programs defend those basic interests. The battle waged by the far-rightists is partly lost. Now they have to face three independent, alternative commentators whose programs add up to about 15 hours a week. That is a meager figure if compared with the dozens of hours spent on the air by the vociferant dogmatists in radio and TV, but the three alternate programs have a value that is qualitatively superior: to respond to an emerging majority with balanced -- not bullet-ridden -- information and bring serious and profound analyses. The shift from the right to a moderate center on the part of personalities and institutions is legitimizing the positions of Garcia, Aruca and Lesnik, a fact that could prompt the current administration to ride the wave and strike an effective blow by satisfying the Cuban-Americans' fundamental demand (the trips). But, as I have said on other occasions, reality is stubborn. [Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief of Radio Progreso Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language version of Progreso Weekly.] * ================================================================ .NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . .339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org .List Archives: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ .Subscribe: https://olm.blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr ================================================================