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Contributor

Raúl Rivero

Contributor

Raúl Rivero

Raúl Rivero is one of Cuba's best-known dissident journalists and a figurehead of the country's beleaguered independent press. He was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment, but was released in November 2004 and arrived in Spain in April 2005. He has faced relentless harassment from Fidel Castro's communist regime and its security agency since leaving the state-controlled press in 1988 because of growing disillusionment with Cuba's political system.

Rivero was born in 1945 in Morón, Camagüey, in central Cuba. He was among the first generation of journalists trained at Havana University's School of Journalism after the 1959 revolution, and he co-founded the satirical magazine Caimán Barbudo in 1966. He worked as Moscow correspondent for the government news agency, Prensa Latina, from 1973 to 1976 before returning to Cuba to head the agency's science and culture service.

Rivero resigned from the National Union of Cuban Writers in 1989 and made a formal break with the regime two years later when on June 2, 1991, he signed the famous Carta de los Intelectuales (Intellectuals' Letter), a petition calling on Castro to free prisoners of conscience. Rivero abandoned official journalism in 1991, denouncing it as "fiction about a country that does not exist."

In 1995 Rivero founded CubaPress, one of a handful of independent, and illegal, news agencies set up by dissident journalists in order to provide an alternative to Cuba's state-owned media. Like the country's other forty-odd journalists working outside the state media, Rivero is viewed as a political dissident and could not publish or broadcast in Cuba. Instead, he sent his work abroad for circulation on the Internet and in U.S. and European publications, although publishing abroad can result in a jail sentence for spreading "enemy propaganda."

Rivero was awarded the World Press Freedom Prize in 2004. He has published several books of poetry, journalism, and interviews.

Articles by Raúl Rivero

Nothing?
By Raúl Rivero
Where I used to dwellin my autumn, with my ragsand I say dwelledbecause I felt aliveinside there as never before.Where I used to inhabittremulous, subtleand I was recognizedby my sinewsand my veinsand…
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell
I Don’t Want Anyone Coming around to Save Me
By Raúl Rivero
I don’t want anyone coming around to save meSo, whoever is sending me those nice thoughts,those smug little messages,–take it elsewhere.Cut off the oxygen now.I don’t want to suffer…
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell
High Fidelity
By Raúl Rivero
They’ll be free from the gramophone’s pain,its torture from the rub and the needles.Chaste, they’ll not know the sinof singing a capella while hungrycaught between the farce and the…
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell
Family Picture in Havana
By Raúl Rivero
Mom and I are alone once againthe same as it was at the end of the forties.Alone, in a house that’s not our own,we tell each other last night’s dreams(in hers two old people are always cryingin…
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell
On Tyranny
By Raúl Rivero
The one that’s out there in the street, out there in the country,the rough and vehement tyranny,that governs my life as a citizenthat one will passbecause it punishes my body,but does not have neither…
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell
Questions
By Raúl Rivero
Why do I have to die / not in my homeland
Translated from Spanish by Diana Alvarez-Amell & Jeffrey Gray