14ymedio, Havana, September 30, 2018 — The official journalist Boris Fuentes starred in another episode of what is by now known as “revolutionary foolishness.” While Mario Vallejo, a journalist for Univisión, was covering a demonstration against the embargo in New York, Fuentes tried to snatch his phone and threatened to smash his face in for filming him.
The altercation began when Vallejo approached a group of demonstrators who were protesting against the embargo and started filming with his cellphone. Journalists from the official Cuban media outlets began to set upon Vallejo with the cameras. “Can’t you see me well enough? So why are you filming me?” Vallejo asked Fuentes.
The official journalist answered that it was the cameraman who was filming and asked him why he was there. Vallejo answered that he was doing his job as a journalist.
“You’re also telling the story badly, so that’s why we are here,” Fuentes told him.
Vallejo told him that Cuban television is introducing Miguel Díaz-Canel as a president-elect. “When was he elected?” he asked.
When Fuentes realized that he was being filmed, he tried to snatch away the phone.
“I’ll smash your face in,” Fuentes spat, and he accused Vallejo of having come to “provoke.”
After receiving various insults, Vallejo withdrew and published the video on Facebook, which has generated more than a hundred comments and has been shared hundreds of times.
“What a lack of respect in the land of liberty. And this poor man doesn’t know the meaning of that word,” said one of the commenters.
Another said that the official journalist thought that he was in Cuba, “where they can’t even record.”
“It’s a shame that they give visas to these imbeciles, while those who really deserve one have to go to another country to apply for one and often aren’t accepted,” added the commenter.
Last Wednesday several journalists from American media outlets were denied entry to Riverside church, in New York, where the Cuban president Díaz-Canel and the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro were scheduled to give a speech. Reporters from Univisión, Telemundo, and the New Herald were removed by security personnel and in a video spread by the journalists one can hear how the officials asking them to leave accused the media outlets from south Florida of trying to “instigate people.”
Mario Vallejo was the same journalist who, in 2015, interviewed Sucelys Morfa González in Panama during the Summit of the Americas. Morfa, later promoted to first secretary of the Union of Young Communists, was part of the Cuban delegation that with shouts and blows prevented several events from being held.
During the interview with Vallejo, visibly exacerbated, Morfa insisted that she was a graduate in psychology, that the Cubans were “rich,” and that the delegation had paid for their tickets to protest at the summit. The video of the interview went viral and ever since the leader has been known as the “millionaire psychologist.”
Translated by: Sheilagh Carey
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