Contact Richard Prince to secure a place at the table.
The Journal-isms™ Roundtable is a dinner group of more than 50 current and former journalists, authors and editors that meets every month, usually at Sunday brunch but sometimes on a Tuesday. Since 1999, the group, led by Journal-isms™ founder and journalist Richard Prince and veteran journalists Paul Delaney, Betty Anne Williams and the late Walt Swanston-NuevaEspana, have hosted journalists, newsmakers and other personalities to have lively, informative and provocative conversations over good food and drink. Ivan Roman later joined the organizing team.
“Cuba: Victim, Villain or Both?”
Cuba has consistently been denounced by press-freedom and human rights groups as a repressive country that persecutes independent journalists, Black and white alike. Yet it holds a fascination for some journalists who visit, find community in the rich culture, especially of Afro-Cubans on the island, and come back to the United States to denounce the U.S. embargo with public thanks from Cuba’s rulers.
How do we reconcile these two views of Cuba?
With a translator to help navigate, we will discuss this with:
- Serafin Moran, Afro-Cuban journalist who won exile in the United States
- Rocio Baro, Afro-Cuban native who is director of communications for “Fondo de Arte Joven,” a platform that supports young Cuban artists in music and visual arts. She is in the U.S. as a Hubert H. Humphrey Fellow at the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
- Dagmar Thiel, CEO of Fundamedios < https://www.fundamedios.org/>, who in 2021 moderated and helped organize National Press Club Forum, “Latin American Press Under Siege
- Darcy Borrero Batista, journalist and human rights defender. She was part of a cross-border investigation in 19 countries, including Cuba, “Violence During Quarantine,” which just won a One World Media Award.
- She wrote on LinkedIn, “WE WON:) all Cubans… especially the more than 1000 women who, as a result of this research, raised their voices to tell their birth experiences. I celebrate for them [including my mother] and for us authors, especially for those who created the enormous project that is Partos Rotos. Thank you for inviting me to collaborate! Cuban journalism is celebrating despite censorship, intimidation, harassment and exile. Congratulations to all!”
- Mónica Baró Sánchez, Cuba native who is in a master’s program in literary reportage at New York University. She is described as “Award-winning reporter and writer trained in an authoritarian regime and strongly committed to freedom of expression, international standards of journalism, rigor, beauty, and the search for truth.” One of her stories, “Salem, the young influencer imprisoned in Villa Marista”
Others to be announced.
Cuba has been in the consciousness of many Americans at least the rise of Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion, and through every presidential election in which the Cuban American vote has been part of the story.
Co-organizers for this Roundtable are Ivan Roman, who is on our Roundtable organizing committee, is a former executive director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and has made three reporting trips to Cuba, and Zita Arocha, a native of Cuba who is about to publish a memoir, “Guajira, the Cuba Girl,” which has already won a book prize from the Inlandia Institute. She is founder of Borderzine.com, a Poynter Institute project consultant, and a professor emeritus of communication at University of Texas El Paso. Some know Zita from her work with NAHJ.