Ordered to shut up

The Cuban authorities have withdrawn the press card of EL PAÍS correspondent Mauricio Vicent, who can now no longer send articles from the island. Only a few weeks earlier, the government of Tehran did the same to Ángles Espinosa, also a correspondent for this newspaper, who was, moreover, expelled from Iran. The accusations of partiality against these correspondents are entirely false, and reveal only that Havana and Tehran want the news media to act as mere mouthpieces for the official line, not as witnesses to reality.

In spite of the geographical and ideological gulf between the two regimes, they coincide on the point that best reveals their authoritarian nature: a will to curb the freedom of the press, the better to impose their propaganda slogans as the one and only truth. In the name of God or of the socialist revolution, both authorities claim the right to deprive people interested in the affairs of Iran or Cuba of true, reliable information: which is just what they deprive their own people of, the better to subjugate them.

The EL PAÍS correspondents are not the first to be expelled by a dictatorial regime; they are not even the first to be expelled by the Cuban and Iranian regimes in their already extensive history of repression. This is why it is easy to say beforehand what the result will be of these outrages committed against the freedom of the press. When both regimes are mere chapters of bad history ? as they will surely come to be sooner rather than later ? the fact of having received the order to shut up, or to leave the country, will be a point of pride for those who, like the two EL PAÍS correspondents, made it their business to tell things as they are. And at the same time, this order will be one more charge laid to the account of the leaders who decided to give it, and of the bureaucrats who carried it out.

After half a century of revolution, the Cuban leaders cannot go on claiming that exterior forces are alone responsible for the political, economic and social morass in which they have plunged the island; nor can they go on persecuting any internal criticism as a crime. And the same is the case with the Iranian revolution, whose aim of subjecting society to the will of a set of ayatollahs who use Islam as a pretext for their own arbitrary power, has resulted only in a schizophrenic split between public life ? hypocritical and artificial to the point of ridicule ? and private life, in which the Iranians give free rein to the desires that they share with men and women in any other part of the world.

With the veto to the EL PAÍS correspondents, Havana and Tehran no doubt imagine they have made a show of strength. But what they have shown, rather, is their weakness. For when a regime perceives the truth as a threat, it is because the lie it is built upon has its days numbered. In Cuba and Iran alike the countdown proceeds apace, however many abuses their governments may yet commit.