A revealing interview with Néstor Baguer by Jean-Guy Allard in Granma International may provide some important clues to the nature of Reporters Without Borders' activities in Cuba. Baguer was president of the so-called Independent Journalists Association when he was hired by Reporters Without Borders, but he was also working for Cuban counterespionage services.
How did he present his objectives?
He presented them to me as a matter of defending press freedom. It was all about freedom of the press “throughout the world”. That theirs was an international organization to protect journalists throughout the world. He said that he was sponsored by large companies in France that gave him money to carry out this work. That there were people in France who were interested in that.
They say that Ménard is an authoritarian type of person who doesn’t like to share. He came out to give instructions. He didn’t listen. He came to tell me what had to be done.
Was RSF already attacking Cuba from France?
Of course. What he wanted was that it should come directly from here. It would seem that before they received all their information from Miami. But he wanted to have his source in Cuba so that it would be more credible.
...
Did he ask you to write on particular subjects?
He specified what he wanted people to talk about. They picked the themes.
Did Regis communicate with you every week?
Almost every week. They were long calls because I had to read out my articles. I read out the news and he recorded it. And then gave advice.
Advice?
Régis reproached me for being too soft. And I told him that I wasn’t used to using certain words. I had a particular level of culture and they asked me why I didn’t call Fidel Castro a murderer. I told them that I had to respect authority otherwise they wouldn’t let me carry on. But he insisted that I call Fidel Castro a murderer, that he was this and that. They never succeeded in making me do this and this made the relationship very tense.
Did he ever get angry with you?
In the end, yes. He was very annoyed. And he broke off the relationship and appointed someone else to be the representative because he said that I wasn’t aggressive enough. And he gave the example of other people who were sending news that was completely false. That there were lots of people on hunger strike and that was false. Nobody was on hunger strike. Once they attempted to begin a hunger strike and I went in person to the place, in the Santo Suárez neighborhood. I went straight inside when they weren’t expecting me. And I found myself with those people and they were making chicken soup. It was all a lie.
Baguer also describes how his work for Reporters Without Borders gave him "a pass to go into USIS any day at any time." USIS is the U.S. diplomatic mission in Cuba. Read the full interview here.
What explains this odd behavior from a supposedly non-governmental organization? Perhaps an article by Salim Lamrani on U.S. Cuba policy published on Z-Net in August has the answer:
On top of all this comes a highly interesting directive whose goal is to affect the Cuban tourism industry, the island’s main source of income. The American government plans to finance with up to $5 million, NGOs of third countries which take part in propaganda operations aimed at dissuading tourists from visiting Cuba. [16] In France, one organisation has played an extremely important role in the libellous campaign against Cuba. This is Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders), which is held in high esteem by American authorities and the Cuban radical right. Moreover, its secretary general, Mr Robert Ménard, gladly accepts invitations from some exiled Cubans in Florida who are heavily implicated in international terrorism. [17]
Recently, Reporters Without Borders held a brainwashing campaign in a Paris airport with tourists departing for Cuba. It is after all officially one of the groups that might be directly funded by Washington. Reporters Without Borders, embarrassed when this new directive was made public, hid itself behind a strange silence. Usually so quick to publish any news regarding the island, it has, up to now, not even mentioned this report which was debated by the press worldwide. Moreover, the organisation’s name is explicitly named in Mr Colin Powell's publication, on page 20.
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New Panama President's Olive Branch to Cuba
Submitted September 10, 2004 - 8:02 pm by Al GiordanoRead the whole speech.
Torrijos' inauguration came on the heels of the 11th hour "pardon" by outgoing president Mireya Moscoso of four anti-Castro Cubans arrested and charged, during the presidential summit of 2000 in Panama City, with a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.
With this "pardon" of four accused terrorists, Moscoso claimed that she was protecting them from deportation to Cuba "or Venezuela" where, she claimed, they could receive "the death penalty." The fact is, there is no capital punishment in Venezuela, which led to Venezuelan recalling its Ambassador from Panamá. (The United States, however, agreed to give asylum to these accused assassination-plotters... so much for the so-called "war on terrorism.")
The new president, Martín Torrijos, during his speech, in which U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was present, among other world leaders, said:
Let me repeat President Torrijos' last sentence there:
Those of us who have read the tea leaves in recent years on the awakening of the dream of Simón Bolívar ("the name of our country is América") can explain the significance of this statement: a radical break from Panama's recent subservience to Washington's orders.
Washington's campaign against Cuba has had less to do with Cuba than it has had to do with efforts to divide the rest of Latin America and impede the inexorable tide toward, at very least, a South American Union, similar to the European Union: an economic and political giant ready to take its seat at the world table.
By making a country's "position on Cuba" a litmus test, Washington has created a smokescreen to divide nation against nation... Whether through the antics of Mexico President Vicente Fox or ex-president of Panama Moscoso...
So far, Central American countries (technically part of "North America") have remained largely timid, given U.S.-funded interventions in recent decades from Guatemala in the 1950s (and since then), to El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s, to the invasion of Panama in 1989 (to topple a U.S.-installed dictator, Manuel Noriega, who got out of hand)...
That the new head-of-state for the most strategic Central American nation - Panama, the nation with the canal that connects Atlantic and Pacific, and, thus, Asia and much of the rest of the world - is now saying that his country "joins in the integration" is a big domino to fall. His appeal looks north to Mexico, where the neoliberal "free trade that isn't free" imposed economic agenda teeters on the ledge of the upcoming 2006 presidential election.
Torrijos' inaugural statement thus places Central America and Mexico (again, all geographically part of North America) in play for the lunging unification of not just South America, but... now... all of Latin America.
Things of this land... a country called América!