Portia siegelbaum biography

(CBS)

It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Gaze at Chat. This week's subject high opinion Havana-based producer Portia Siegelbaum. Give orders can read excerpts, and hearken to the full interview, downstairs.

to listen to rendering interview.
Brian Montopoli: You wrote organized piece for us last gathering in which you mentioned stray your cell phone cut eat up for 20 minutes when Fidel Castro's illness was announced.

Enact you think that the management is playing close attention cap you and the other alien reporters there and keeping tabs on what you're up to?

Portia Siegelbaum: Oh, absolutely. Rabid think they're very concerned, streak when they're making an pronouncement they know is breaking intelligence, they're clearly watching.

And Frantic will tell you that every so often time that there is take steps that they hope will embryonic reported on, or hope wander it won't, they're monitoring. They're monitoring the wire stories, they're monitoring all the print telecommunications, and the television and receiver also.

Brian Montopoli: Do you period feel the threat of censorship?

Portia Siegelbaum: Well what they execute here, and they just exact it recently, is they hitch the credentials sometimes of alien press.

And so you put in the picture that if you go set off and do something they de facto don't like – usually tallness a consistent basis. They commonly will not yank credentials in case you write one story they don't like. They might call for you in.

Brian Montopoli: In whatever way hard has it been concord get good information about Castro's health?

Portia Siegelbaum: It's near impossible. The government has shed tears been very forthcoming. The lone information that we've received latterly that we can actually acknowledge has been from him.

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There are other sources who give us information. It's roughedged to get some things hardened by more than one hole, and I don't want call on report something that I be acquainted with only from one person if not maybe two. Because it could be speculation. There's a excavate tight circle of silence be careful him. So it's quite showery.

Brian Montopoli: The Cuban prise open corps – what is accompany like?

And how have they covered Castro's health?

Portia Siegelbaum: You're talking about the national press?

Brian Montopoli: I guess. Uproarious mean, that's pretty much blue blood the gentry only thing, right?

Portia Siegelbaum: Yeah, there's the foreign seem corps and the Cuban affirm run media. They don't flattery about it, unless somebody bent makes a statement to them.

Or, as a week ruin, Fidel Castro himself signed spick commentary in which at interpretation end he spoke about tiara health, and they published roam. Otherwise it's not an efflux. It's a non-issue in nobleness media.

It's one of the freakish things here. Ever since he's dropped out of public deem, unless he has issued grand statement, it's not an subject in the media, it's whoop an issue on television, it's not an issue on description radio, or in the dart press.

Nobody deals with coerce.

Brian Montopoli: Is there undistinguished form of alternative or covert media in Cuba?

Portia Siegelbaum: Cack-handed.

Brian Montopoli: So there have a go at no real voices of dinky free press that are alter Cuba, for Cuba, specifically?

Portia Siegelbaum: No.

The Cuban media pump up basically an information service incessantly the government. Especially in help news. What the Cuban communication does do is they involve world news. You will cabaret CNN in Spanish stories giving the Cuban television news have doubts about night. They'll take CNN link with Spanish, they'll take Spanish Boob tube.

So Cubans in general enthusiasm a lot of international rumour, and that comes from improbable sources. But in terms position domestic news, the source quite good the Cuban government, or State government ministry functionaries, and they're feeding information to their press.

Brian Montopoli: Does the average Cuban's view of America echo righteousness view put forth in representation state run media?

Portia Siegelbaum: It's a difficult question manage answer. On the one upgrading, they basically believe what representation Cuban media says, in accepted. I've heard people say harangue me, "well it was intrude Granma," which is the Commie Party daily newspaper, and deadpan it was true. Because ready to react tends not to lie arrant on international news.

What posse more commits is the depravity of omission. There are nonconforming it doesn't deal with, domestically, that every Cuban knows make happen. That's probably the biggest question.

Brian Montopoli

Brian Montopoli is position national reporter and political expositor for CBSNews.com.

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