Works In Progress - October 2007 - Local Organizer Discusses Islands: Cuba and Media

[Long-time Olympia resident, Rick Fellows, was one of the primary founders of Media Island (816 Adams St.), a 21-year old activist center “dedicated to provide access to alternative media and first-hand sources of information regionally, nationally, and internationally.” The center is also “committed to collecting, processing, and distributing crucial information addressing the social justice, economic democracy, ecological sustainability and peace issues that we all collectively face.” Along with an active presence at the center, Fellows also annually participates in international aid caravans, primarily for IFCO (Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization), that have traveled to Chiapas, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Cuba. In this interview, Fellows talks about the current federal treatment of caravans to Cuba and where Media Island is in new developments .]

Brendan Funtek: You’ve been on the caravan a number of years, how has it changed in terms of the US policy crossing the border and the direct ways in which the law enforcement treat everybody on the caravan both coming to Cuba and back from?

Rick Fellowes: On the first caravan, they lined up a lot of police and huge tow trucks. It was very intimidating. I think they thought we were going to put our tail up between our legs and run. They attempted to stop us but what we did was started hand-carrying the items across the border. It forced them to arrest people carrying one of five items that were carefully selected to challenge the nature of the embargo and illustrate the nature of the embargo. Critical medicines, powdered milk, bibles in Spanish. The charges were dropped.

In every event, they’ve let us go because it looks bad and creates press for our cause. If they actually detain us, it’s an international news story: the US is preventing the export of humanitarian aid.

In recent years, they’ve tried to demonstrate that they’re enforcing the embargo usually by attempting to seize all of our computers. In the case of the last caravan, they seized a token amount of computers that were not even the best computers we had on the caravan.

BF: What is the history of federal prosecution or assessment of charges against caravanistas (people on the caravan)?

RF: There’s never been charges related to the actual embargo. In the two previous years to this one, everybody got Treasury Department letters asking for information that would lead to your prosecution. If you read the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, you’re not required to supply information that could lead to your prosecution. They’re not allowed to compel you to self-incriminate. Apparently, the Treasury Department doesn’t know basic provisions of the Constitution. If they want to prosecute you, they have to do the investigation to prove that you broke the law. For all they know, you could’ve been fully hosted, not spent money in Cuba. In the case of the caravanistas, that’s the case. You’re not dealing in cash, you’re not paying for your meals unless you want to.

BF: What is the experience like for caravanistas who get into Cuba and how does their experience tend to differ from someone who managed to make it through via a flight to Mexico or Canada on their own or with a small group of friends, privately going?

RF: When you go with a caravan, you’re treated like any international solidarity organization, you’ll have Cuban greeters, people that work with the Cuban Institute for Friendship of the People. They can help provide transportation and logistics of arranging visits.

People that just land in Cuba don’t really have a connection. Cuba is a country with a certain shortage of creature comforts and people are looking to be able to buy stuff, have some money. Unfortunately, people who go to Cuba on their own will encounter people who are working them one way or another because they’re tourists. There’s a different interface [between tourists and caravanistas]. Individual travelers need to know that. Especially if they’re going there hoping to learn Cuba’s a terrible place US propaganda says it is.

A lot of people secretly want to believe that the US is not as bad of a neighbor to Latin America as they’re made out to be by the Left. If somebody tells them terrible things about Fidel Castro and how little freedom of speech they have, there’s a lot of people from the US who like to hear that and the Cubans know.

If a Cuban walks up to a North American and says “you know, you’re government is really ugly to our country and it’s really bad that your country lacks medical care and has people sleeping under bridges, homeless in the rain and snow. That’s really bad.” You know, the North American is not going to [reply] “Oh, can I buy you a meal at the Paladar so you can tell me about it?” If a Cuban walks up to a North American and says “Let me tell you about how Fidel Castro kills old men and feeds the meat to small children,” the North American will buy them a meal and buy them lots of beers to hear these kinds of tales.

There’s a lot of guilt in [the US] and [travelers] don’t want it reinforced. A lot of people going to Cuba are not as political necessarily. There’s a lot of people who want to go for the beaches or because it’s cool to have been to Cuba. People who go in solidarity travel will meet Cubans proud of their revolution and of the country’s accomplishments.

BF: So what have been recent developments with Media Island: maintenance, income, different projects like KOWA, what’s the overall state?

RF: We’ve been in a financial crunch. Summertime tends to be that way for organizations but Media Island has special needs to finance the expenses of a house every month. Sometimes it becomes too much of a treadmill where we’re not doing forward thinking. We’re not as much able to launch campaigns outside of paying money for the bills. We can do good work. We do a lot of events, films, public speakers and that’s how we’ve been paying the bills.

I think we underestimate at Media Island how much really good work has come out of there and how much we’ve accomplished. We look at what other organizations accomplish and maybe they do what they do well but they’re biting off a smaller piece of the pie to chew on than we are. Because we’re trying to support a wide range of projects. We’ve got fiscal sponsorship programs, maintaining the house, maintaining the technical infrastructure, upkeeping a library, keeping a kitchen clean and functioning, keeping a radio station going.

BF: It seems like a lot of media groups nationwide have gained a lot of staying power in the last five years. Has that fostered any newfound alliances, being exposed to groups like Free Press or Reclaim Democracy?

RF: That’s what Media Island would like to be most focused on because media draws together so many different issues.

Media in itself is like a second issue. Media concentration and all that, why does that matter? It matters because really bad decisions are imperiling the world’s future and well-being of people all over the planet now. Suffering under policies of US-backed governments. US-directed financial institutions that pull strings all over the world. All kinds of global disasters are happening partly because of lack of public information in the United States about how responsible the United States was and is. And how really important it is that the public do something about how bad corporations have gotten in this country and how this country acts like a rogue around the world. And the reason they can get away with it is because a few companies control our media and the public thinks its all Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. And it’s not. It’s gangland.

This government is like a mafia hit team and it’s been like that for a long time.

Media is secondary in a certain sense to a lot of principles issues. But people that care about any issue should become a media activist and become focused on educating the public that we need a consciousness movement that relates to media. Where do we get our information? Are we self-respecting people? Do we get our information from General Electric? Could it be that we’re letting ourselves be manipulated? Does having a big ego interfere with our ability to accept the idea that we might be manipulated? And we learn to have big egos early on. Our schools socialize us from very young to be ego-motivated and competitive. It’s set up in the public education system. It’s shameful how little people in the United States are willing to admit they’re brutally manipulated.

If Media Island were able to be better organized. If we had more volunteers or if more people could focus more time on it, some of the best spent time would be networking with other media activist organizations and work with them to build more of a movement around media issues.

[Interviewed by Brendan Funtek.

For more info on Cuba caravans, visit http://www.ifconews.org . For more info on Media Island, visit http://www.mediaisland.org or call 360-352-8526]