Cuba's voices of freedom

Encouraging a freer flow of information in Fidel Castro's Cuba has never been easy, but recent developments in Havana and Washington will make it even harder.

In Havana earlier this month, the hammer fell on Rafael Solano, a journalist whose realistic dispatches were said to be attempts at subversion. Given a choice between jail and exile, and having already served six weeks in a Cuban prison, he chose exile in Spain, which meant leaving a vulnerable family behind.

Solano belongs to a courageous group of risk-taking independent Cuban journalists. He is the founder of Havana Press, one of three unofficial news agencies that may herald a return to press freedom in post-Castro Cuba. Each is staffed by journalists whose unwillingness to regurgitate official pap lost them jobs at governmental news agencies. Though they cannot print or broadcast reports within Cuba, the unofficial agencies have been able to provide uncensored accounts via fax to newspapers and radio stations elsewhere.

Journalists like these have been an important news source for Radio Marti, an American government station named after Jose Marti, the Cuban exile whose eloquence ignited Cuba's rebellion against Spain. The station has broadcast into Cuba since 1983. It is based in Washington, under the administrative umbrella of the Voice of America. This arrangement was expressly stipulated by Congress, and is meant to protect Radio Marti from jostling rivalries within the Cuban exile community in Miami. By common consent, the arrangement has worked well, and the station has provided a closed society with credible reports on the Castro regime.

Unhappily, Congress has just reversed itself and called for moving the station to southern Florida, and has done so without any hearings or debate. The sponsor of this silent coup was Senator Phil Gramm, in a bid for votes in Florida's Republican presidential primary. The senator's campaign failed, but his proposal remained in a continuing appropriations bill. The move could undermine the station's true claim that it is not the captive of any faction of the Cuban-exile community in Florida, including the fervently anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation.

The integrity of Radio Marti should not be sacrificed to the whim of a handful of lawmakers in Washington catering to the demands and financial support of a portion of the Cuban-exile community in Florida.

-- The New York Times