The New York Times owes one to Cuba and me.

 

IT rocked the whole world a couple of weeks ago when the powerful New York Times acknowledged that it had produced coverage that did not correspond to reality with respect to the existence of biological weapons and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That recognition made me remember the large debt owed to Cuba and to me by the powerful New York daily.

In great part, the ample coverage afforded by the important newspaper to the pretext mooted by the George W. Bush administration for invading Iraq contributed to the U.S. people’s erroneous perception of the reasons that provoked the conflict, while granting the White House impunity in its international war-mongering campaign. In fact, The New York Times was yet another accomplice in these machinations. Another distancing from reality has been occurring with Cuba for more than 40 years.

One of the few occasions on which The New York Times has addressed the subject of Cuba seriously was in July of 1998, in two reports by authors Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rother. In those articles, they published a statement by the notorious terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, in which he implicated the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in funding attacks on Cuban hotels.

With an eloquence worthy of an unscrupulous criminal, Posada recounted to his interviewers how he started out on the CIA payroll in 1960, as well as aspects of his long career as a terrorist. He didn’t leave out a single detail of his jail breakout in Venezuela while serving a prison term for his participation in the mid-flight explosion of a Cuban airliner, a criminal act that killed 73 innocent people. It was an escape guaranteed by the CANF itself, and he stated that as such without beating around the bush.

A FACT HIDDEN BY THE New York Times, WHICH NEVER ADMITTED IT

Apparently interested in such details in order to explore the issue of terrorism on the basis of the confessions Posada made to Larry Rohter and Ann Louise Bardach, and protecting itself from CANF threats to sue it for libel, the Times sent Timothy Golden, one of its best reporters, to Cuba. For two weeks, with the total cooperation of the Cuban authorities, Golden received ample information on the participation of CANF and other terrorist groups in aggressions against Cuba. He was able to interview five Central Americans arrested in Havana, as well as several Cuban State Security officials, who provided him with detailed information on the issue.

On June 12, 1998, he was received by President Fidel Castro, with whom he had a long conversation. Likewise, he was attended to by Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power. As a result of these fruitful contacts, Golden obtained a fat dossier, similar to the one that Cuba had delivered some days earlier to the FBI, specifically in June of 1998. There were no doubts, then, that The New York Times had sufficient evidence to take on the CANF in a potential lawsuit, while also possessing sufficient information to produce a serious and profound journalistic work with respect to the issue at hand.

In my particular case, at the time still a secret collaborator with Cuban State Security in Miami, having infiltrated the CANF’s terrorist wing as well as another group of the same stripe, Cuba Independiente y Democrática (CID), I was called to Havana on August 5, 1998. The decision had already been taken to “burn me” in the interest of exposing the constant terrorism against our country.

I still recall my arrival at José Martí International Airport with nostalgia. The presence there of two of my case officers confirmed my certainty that my anonymous life in the service of Cuba was about to come to an end. I really can’t say what I was going through at that moment, and I didn’t know why I had been hurriedly recalled to the island, but I realized that I wasn’t going back to Miami again.

On August 13, 1998, Timothy Golden interviewed me at a house in Siboney. I had received instructions from headquarters to be frank and open with him and that I should concentrate on relating to him how my life had been as an anti-terrorist fighter. In his eyes and by the rest of his body language, I admit I detected a profound interest to know every detail concerning my links with CANF and Luis Posada Carriles. He seemed to me to be, without doubt, a serious and conscientious journalist.

I acknowledge, however, that it was difficult for me to be sincere and open with a U.S. journalist whom I did not know at all and that it had to me precisely me, a person who had zealously guarded the secret of my participation in this anonymous battle for years, to recount to him names and facts that were a closely-guarded secret for me until that moment. As I had been directed, I stuck to the truth and told him everything, without holding back details.

The interview was over three hours long and Golden taped and noted down every detail. We were both smoking until we’d finished a pack of my cigarettes. He checked all my ID documents thoroughly. Then we shook hands and said goodbye. Golden, my comrades and I all knew it: Cuba had presented The New York Times with one of its oldest collaborators in the struggle against terrorism, an important sacrifice in the name of truth.

In my personal case, despite the fact that I had agreed to take this step that would change my life for the benefit the Revolution, initially I felt depressed rather than proud. I would have preferred to keep fighting anonymously as I had been doing up until that moment. However, I accepted it as a soldier and with the full conviction of the consequent benefit of this decision.

In a suspicious silence, the months went by and The New York Times did not deign to publish any information or reference whatsoever to the multiple evidence provided by Cuba. To our surprise, 30 days after my interview with Golden, our brothers in Miami were arrested and subjected to the derision and hatred of the intolerant group of the Miami ultra-right wing. The press and other media placed themselves at the service of those spurious interests and in June 2000, our five brothers were handed down long and unjust prison sentences.

On January 5, 2003 the daily published an article on Cuba. Written by Timothy Golden himself, The New York Times made serious charges against the island that did not differ in any way from the perverse arguments that have always been used by the U.S. government.

If the excrescence spilling out of Golden’s article on Cuba was loathsome, more despicable was his slander in relation to the five Cuban heroes, who have now spent five years unjustly incarcerated in the United States. Using convoluted arguments, he tried to present these anti-terrorist fighters as common criminals and spies, distorting the real motives that led them to confront the cruelest terrorism ever carried out against their homeland. On that occasion, The New York Times committed one of its most atrocious errors by aligning itself with lies and casting justice and reason aside. Timothy Golden, as we will see, transformed himself from a slavish journalist into a servile instrument of infamy.

I have often asked myself: Would they have been able to go through with that rigged trial of our five heroes in Miami if Timothy Golden and The New York Times had published the truth about anti-Cuba terrorism? Would the same fate have befallen them and would the U.S. public’s perception have been the same? Would anti-Cuba intolerance and hatred have triumphed with the ease that it did? Wouldn’t they, perhaps, have been able to avoid other acts of terrorism afterwards, such as the attempted assassination of Fidel in Panama or the infiltration of the terrorist group that planned to plant explosive devices at the Tropicana in April 2001?

There is not the slightest doubt that The New York Times owes Cuba a tremendous debt and me in particular. A tremendous debt also to the truth which it betrayed with its shameless omission or questionable commitment to the ultra-right in Miami and the U.S. administration. But the most objectionable part for a newspaper is the doubt it contracted with its own readers, whom it also betrayed and robbed of an important truth.

If The New York Times prides itself on being capable of correcting errors, I believe the time has come to sincerely express its guilt for having concealed the truth in this chapter of anti-Cuba terrorism. If it were to do so Juan María Alponte, professor of the Social and Political Sciences faculty at UNAM, would be right when he commented in an article on Monday, May 31 in Mexico’s El Universal, “given that with great ethical courage The New York Times is rectifying and clarifying much of the information it has published on Iraq, from this admirable self-criticism, the daily could now observe international, Cuban and Latin American problems from a historical perspective that does not give the right to George W. Bush.”

Thus the reality is that the mea culpa not acknowledged by The New York Times has become, above all, a question of dignity. 

Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy

Guatemalan writer