The other day the notorious Manuel David Orrio asked to be my Facebook friend. You can’t place the name? Sorry. What about the martyred Orlando Zapata Tamayo?
At this point I could easily segue into a brief essay on the transformation of American media—how in our wondrous new age of microlocal online news coverage, no zoning change is too trivial to be reported but complicated international stories fall through the cracks. But the subject I really want to get to is Manuel David Orrio.
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I first read about him in March 2003 in the Tribune. That was back when the Tribune liked to think of itself as a paper that covered the world and actually had a reporter, Gary Marx, posted in Havana. Marx introduced Orrio as “one of Cuba’s 100 or so independent journalists,” a wary man who said he’d been “briefly detained, watched by state security, kicked out of his local community organization, denounced in public by a group of neighbors and criticized by Cuban President Fidel Castro on television for being counterrevolutionary.” His work couldn’t be published in Cuba but it was posted on CubaNet.org, a Miami website “funded by the U.S. government.”
The communist newspaper Diario Granma explained that for 11 years Orrio had been working undercover as a “paid mercenary” for the American government office in Havana. Unbeknownst to his Yankee masters, he’d “infiltrated ‘laboratory dissidents,’ journalists who never truly were, and ‘diplomats’ dedicated to espionage and internal subversion.” At last the truth could be told, and Orrio, the newest hero of the Cuban people, could bask in the “applause and affection of astonished neighbors.”
Orrio got back to me immediately. He gave me his e-mail address and said he’d rather correspond that way. And then he asked me to be his Facebook friend. When a day went by and he hadn’t answered my e-mail I decided to butter him up. I accepted his invitation.
“It is no doubt true that some of the 75, but certainly not all, and Cuba didn’t even pretend to prove all, were accepting money from the U.S. government for certain activities, such as publishing and distributing ‘democracy’ materials. . . . This is an unfortunate fact of Cuban political life long before the revolution—the U.S. meddles, the U.S. flexes, the U.S. tries to influence and impose. Me, personally, I wish that no one took a single dime, that whatever Cuban dissidents had to say or do could be achieved without non-Cuban funds. But the fact is that the state controls the media—so if you have something to say that contradicts state dogma, you either swallow it or pursue alternative means. And the fact is that alternative means cannot exist, no matter how modest, without foreign funds or illegal use of state resources.”
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