The Revolution Will Be Teletyped Cuba’S Prensa Latina News Agency and the Cold War Contest Over Information
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The Revolution Will Be Teletyped Cuba’s Prensa Latina News Agency and the Cold War Contest over Information ✣ Renata Keller On 22 January 1959, less than a month after Fidel Castro and his fellow revolutionaries drove Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista from power, 400 jour- nalists and photographers from around the world gathered in the Habana Riv- iera Hotel for Operación Verdad (Operation Truth). They listened as Castro pointed out that they, as members of the media, possessed a powerful weapon: the ability to shape public opinion. Yet there was a problem. “We [Latin Amer- icans] do not have international cables. You, journalists from Latin America, have no resort other than to accept whatever the foreign cables say.” But the Cuban revolution had shown that change was possible. “The press of Latin America,” Castro declared, “should take control of the means that will permit them to know the truth and not be victims of lies.”1 Castro’s call for Latin American journalists to seize control of the means of news production and dissemination was the first official step in creating Prensa Latina, a Cuban news agency with global aspirations. Castro and his collaborators worked to provide an alternative source of information for news- papers, magazines, and radio and television programs around the world. They recognized the crucial role that news agencies, or wire services, play in collect- ing and distributing the raw material that becomes repackaged into front-page headlines, primetime reports, and eventually even history books.2 Surprisingly, scholars have largely overlooked Prensa Latina, even though the wire service produced much of the news that later generations and people at the time considered noteworthy. Even where Prensa Latina does appear in the historical record, it has been, for the most part, only a minor element of 1. María Begoña Aróstegui Uberuaga and Gladys Blanco Cabrera, Un desafio al monopolio de la intriga (Havana: Editora Política, 1981), pp. 13–14. 2. This article uses the terms “news agency” and “wire service” interchangeably. Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 2019, pp. 88–113, doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00895 © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 88 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00895 by guest on 02 October 2021 Cuba’s Prensa Latina News Agency the story or is dismissed as “only of real significance in Cuba.”3 Other aspects of Cuban and Latin American media are far better understood. Most analyses of Cuban media in particular focus on internal production and censorship, but analyzing the history of Prensa Latina uncovers complementary—and equally important—external efforts to control information.4 The previous lack of studies of Prensa Latina is part of a general trend. Wire services generally receive less attention than other forms of media from scholars and the public. After all, much of the knowledge that news agencies produce gets subsumed within more recognizable newspapers, radio, or tele- vision programs. Wire service stories frequently are used without attribution, so they become even more invisible and can be difficult to trace. As a result of this inattention to the crucial work of wire services like Prensa Latina, we know much more about final news products and their uses than about the highly contested and political process of creating and disseminating that news in the first place.5 This article is the first in-depth study in English of Prensa Latina’s cre- ation, reception, and significance. It draws on a wide variety of archival and published sources, including Cuban media and memoirs, declassified 3. Alexander Craig, “The Media and Foreign Policy,” International Journal, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1 April 1976), p. 326. Prensa Latina makes brief appearances in some analyses of Cuban media, foreign pol- icy, and public diplomacy, as well as in biographies of the agency’s founding members. See John D. Harbron, “Journalism and Propaganda in the New Cuba,” in Irving Louis Horowitz and Jaime Suchlicki, eds., Cuban Communism, 9th ed. (St. Louis, MO: Transaction Publishers, 1967), p. 456; Alberto Ciria, “La comunicación política en América Latina: Algunos de sus problemas,” Estudios in- ternacionales, Vol. 2, No. 4 (8) (1 January 1969), p. 537; Miles D. Wolpin, “La influencia internacional de la revolución cubana: Chile, 1958–1970,” Foro internacional, Vol. 12, No. 4 (48) (1 April 1972), p. 472; James W. Carty, Jr., and Janet Liu Terry, “Cuban Communicators,” Caribbean Quarterly,Vol. 22, No. 4 (1 December 1976), p. 65; Jorge I. Domínguez, To Make the World Safe for Revolution: Cuba’s Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 269; Jorge Ruiz Miyares, “A Look at Media in Cuba,” Peace Review, Vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1999), p. 79; and Michael J. Busta- mante and Julia E. Sweig, “Buena Vista Solidarity and the Axis of Aid: Cuban and Venezuelan Public Diplomacy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, No. 616 (1 March 2008), p. 228. Three noteworthy exceptions are Aróstegui Uberuaga and Blanco Cabrera, Un desafio al mo- nopolio de la intriga; Enrique Arrosagaray, Rodolfo Walsh en Cuba: Agencia Prensa Latina, milicia, ron y criptografía (Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2004); and Conchita Dumois and Gabriel Molina, Jorge Ricardo Masetti: El comandante segundo (Havana: Editorial Capitán San Luis, 2012). 4. Among the best studies of Cuban media are Yeidy M. Rivero, Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Com- mercial Television, 1950–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), esp. chs. 1, 3; Louis A. Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Michael Chanan, Cuban Cin- ema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Oscar Luis López, La radio en Cuba (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1988). 5. Gertrude Joch Robinson, News Agencies and World News: In Canada, the United States and Yu- goslavia: Methods and Data (Fribourg: University of Fribourg, 1981), p. 189; and Jonathan Fenby, The International News Services (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 7. 89 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_a_00895 by guest on 02 October 2021 Keller intelligence reports, U.S. State Department records, and newspaper articles from across the Americas. Prensa Latina was a powerful weapon in Castro’s revolutionary arsenal because it provided a new way for the Cuban govern- ment to gather and shape information and to build international solidarity by sharing its side of the story with the rest of the world. Knowledge production is an inherently political act, and struggles over who gets to produce news and whose news gets used have high stakes for ev- eryone involved. As Lillian Guerra has observed of post-revolutionary media politics in Cuba, news mattered because “discourse shaped events and condi- tioned outcomes by shaping people’s perceptions of what was possible.”6 From the subjects of the news to the journalists who write about them, from the editors who craft the stories to the media who broadcast them, and from the govern- ments that regulate the news to the ones that manipulate it, everyone involved in knowledge production engages in numerous contests over information. Each of these contests takes place within multiple, interconnected con- texts, and analyzing struggles over the production of knowledge can help us better understand the contexts within which that knowledge is created and contested. Prensa Latina was a product of the Cuban revolution and the Cold War. It was also a forerunner of a postcolonial movement among so-called Third World or developing countries in the 1970s to reshape the interna- tional flow of information.7 The story of Prensa Latina thus sheds light on the barriers that less powerful countries face—and occasionally surmount—in 6. Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba, p. 3; emphasis in original. Media studies scholars describe the mutual influence of the media, governments, and citizens upon one another’s actions and priorities as “agenda-setting” or “agenda-building.” See Manuel Castells, Communication Power (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 2009), pp. 155–165; and Vian Bakir, “News, Agenda Building, and Intelligence Agencies: A Systematic Review of the Field from the Discipline of Journalism, Media, and Communi- cations,” The International Journal of Press/Politics, Vol. 20, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 131–144. Histori- ans of informal empire have described the political utility of the media as a “representational machine”; that is, “a set of mechanisms, processes and apparatuses that produce and circulate representations constitutive of cultural difference.” Ricardo D. Salvatore, “The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representa- tional Machines of Informal Empire,” in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Rela- tions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 69–104, esp. 72. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 1–25. 7. On the World Information Debate and the attempt to create a New World Information and Com- munication Order, see Robinson, News Agencies and World News;Fenby,The International News Services;