As part of a campaign orchestrated by political circles in the United States that predicted it would last just a few months of life, throughout the years, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, it was subjected to pressures, threats, closures, aggression and attacks on its reporters; however, it managed not only to survive, but also to move forward.
American historian Renata Keller concluded in a research on the news agency whose headquarters are in Havana, that “Prensa Latina survived, expanded and even flourished”.
In the conclusions of her detailed work, Keller expressed that “in some ways, survival alone could be considered a victory”, while demonstrating the capacity its resilience in the face of numerous attacks, which she described as “impressive and unprecedented”.
“Its founders hoped to create an alternative source of news and information for Cuba, Latin America and the rest of the world, and they succeeded,” the academic concluded about the role of the news cable media in promoting the Cuban Revolution and counteracting the isolation to which the United States subjected it.
The hostility against PL not only took the form of political actions and attempts to isolate it and close its offices, but also its journalists were the targets of attempts on their lives .
There were many hostile acts, from vandalism against its office at the United Nations to the arrest by the FBI of the first correspondent in that country, Francisco V. Portela, in order to intimidate him.
In 1970, Chilean journalist Elmo Catalán, a PL collaborator in Bolivia, and his wife Jenny Koeller were murdered. Shortly thereafter, the Bolivian coup regime closed that correspondent’s office.
In 1972, correspondent Luis Martirena, who had been director of the Havana bureau until mid-1971, was riddled with bullets along with his wife Ivette Jiménez in front of their house in Montevideo. The press office was also raided. Shortly thereafter, the Uruguayan military junta closed it.
Prensa Latina personnel and Chilean journalists in the Santiago correspondent’s office were the target of a shooting on September 11, 1973. Jorge Timossi was chief correspondent in Chile during the entire political process headed by President Salvador Allende.
On that fateful day of the military uprising against Allende’s popular government, the offices in Santiago were violently raided, its journalists arrested and expelled from the country. Among them were, besides Timossi, Chilean Elena Acuña, Peruvian Jorge Luna and Cuban Mario Mainadé.
There were other attacks: the head of the Guatemala City bureau, Manuel Guerrero, was the target of death threats and a bomb attack against his office, and further back in time, the special envoy in Honduras was expelled following the coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya.
In October 1983, the office in Grenada was closed during the U.S. invasion of that Caribbean island and its correspondent, Arnaldo Hutchinson, was arrested and deported.
HOSTILITIES DID NOT STOP PRENSA LATINA
However, despite these hostilities, the agency did not stop; during this period it signed journalistic cooperation agreements with many media outlets in Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and even the United States.
After the reopening of correspondents in Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador, and the one opened in Portugal, it closed 1974 with offices in 26 countries.
It sponsored in Havana the First Meeting of Editors of Socialist Agencies on Latin American Topics and established ties with the CTK, of the then Czechoslovakia; the APN, of Poland; Tanjug, of Yugoslavia, and with the French weekly L’Express.
In the Eastern Caribbean it opened its first stations in 1975, in Guyana and Jamaica, as well as in 1976 in Angola, Africa, and Sri Lanka, South Asia, and began its transmissions for those regions in Spanish, English and French.
The institution progressively continued to establish cooperative links with the most diverse media in the world: among many others, the TASS agency of the Soviet Union, ADN of the German Democratic Republic, PTI of India, BBS of Bangladesh and ANOP of Portugal.
After being interrupted since 1969, it resumed the exchange of news services with the U.S. Associated Press (AP) in 1979 through a cooperation agreement.
That year it also established with the Spanish news agency EFE a new communications system through the Intersputnik satellite, which linked Havana with Madrid.
In 1989, Prensa Latina had 40 correspondent offices and over 1,000 media outlets received daily an average of 300 news dispatches in Spanish, English, French and Portuguese.
These advances were cut short with the worsening of the economic crisis in Cuba during the 1990s, which forced it to reduce services, publications and close offices, reducing the number from 40 to only 16 abroad.
Subsequently, due to the U.S. blockade against Cuba, many Prensa Latina correspondents faced hurdles to establish bank accounts and make financial transfers, as well as obstacles to do visa procedures to cover international events.
Throughout all these years, Prensa Latina was led by 10 general directors. After its founding head, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, nine others took over, at different stages of the agency’s development, with the complex tasks of not only maintaining its operation, but also ensuring its growth and influence until it became a multimedia center of reference.
Fernando Revuelta (1961-1962), José Felipe Carneado (1962-1967), Orlando Fundora (1967) and José M. Ortiz (1967-1970) led the agency in the face of numerous external aggression in its first decade of existence.
Manuel Yepe was in charge of directing it from 1970 to 1973, when pressures against PL were mounting. He was followed by Gustavo Robreño in 1973, who remained in charge until 1984 when Pedro Margolles took the reins.
During the latter’s tenure, the agency opened offices in Ethiopia and Nicaragua, and reopened in Costa Rica, while modernizing its technical infrastructure by automating transmissions.
In 2003, Frank González assumed his leadership and under his command the agency expanded its news services, reopened bureaus in Panama, Paris, New Delhi, added new publications and created a small video news studio.
Since 2010, under the direction of Luis Enrique González, Prensa Latina entered the world of social media, diversified its news services, modernized its websites, created new ones in French and Arabic, opened correspondents in Damascus, Washington, San Salvador and Port-au-Prince, and reopened London and San José (again).
In spite of the economic adversities, it maintains, with great effort of its journalistic staff, a daily production of close to 400 news items in six languages, produces some twenty radio programs and opened an online radio station. In addition, it continued to sign agreements with news agencies and other media organizations, which number in the hundreds.
With offices in almost 40 countries in all continents, Prensa Latina has ratified itself as the Cuban media that publishes the most news daily, and one of the most informative in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Its website is the Cuban portal with the best positioning on the Internet, according to the Alexa ranking, and subscribers to the agency’s social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, are growing every day.
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