FLORIDA, January 23, 2014 – Aida Calviac Mora, a former senior editor of Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper Granma, has left the island and joined her husband, a former Radio Rebelde editor, in Miami.
Calviac, one of the highest-ranking journalists to defect in recent years, told America TeVe that she had arrived in the United States via Mexico and planned to stay.
In an interview with talk show host Juan Manuel Cao, the 29-year-old editor said she severed ties with Granma last September after she was stopped at Havana airport and denied permission to travel abroad, apparently because of her senior position at the newspaper. She subsequently left Cuba on her second attempt.
Calviac appeared on the program El Espejo alongside her husband Abel Gonzalez Veranes, a former news director at Radio Rebelde, who defected to the United States last year.
Calviac, Granma’s former international news pages editor, criticized the state media monopoly and said censorship caused a “crisis of credibility” in the relationship between the public and the Cuban news media.
And although Cuban President Raul Castro and First Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel have repeatedly urged journalists to be more aggressive, she said: “You censor yourself . . . and don’t go beyond that limit.”
She disclosed that whenever she approached the newspaper’s directors with new ideas and different perspectives for news coverage she was told “it’s not a good time” or “the enemy could use it against us.”
She indicated that her position in charge of Granma’s foreign coverage brought her “special attention within the Central Committee” of the ruling Communist Party because “you can’t criticize certain countries” and anger their embassies in Havana.
Granma, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, derives its name from the vessel Granma that carried Fidel Castro and 81 others to Cuba’s shores in 1956, launching the Cuban Revolution.
Calviac’s departure came a year after a travel reform went into effect that scrapped an exit visa requirement that for five decades had made it difficult for most islanders to go abroad.
A year into the new law, Cubans are traveling in record numbers. Some have not returned to their homeland. There are nevertheless still major hurdles to overseas travel, such as affording the cost of airfare in a country where the average monthly wage is $20. Obtaining visas from countries that view Cubans as possible immigrants can also pose difficulties.
