January 3, 2025
Sally O’Brien, American journalist and activist and friend of Cuba, receiving the Felix Elmuza Distinction this year. Photo: Yoandry Avila Guerra.
Last December 30, as it was preparing to say goodbye to another year, Cuba suffered the forced farewell of a friend: that day Sally O’Brien, the communicator and activist who taught many Cubans “to look at the United States from the perspective of its most committed children”, died in her modest apartment in Brooklyn, New York.
The phrase in quotation marks, by our diplomat Orestes Hernández Hernández, would fit perfectly as an epitaph to remember this woman who together with her husband Pedro (Shango) constituted an exemplary couple of solidarity with Cubans from the very heart of the empire that blockades us.
“We knew of her broken health but, as it happens with the people we love, we never accepted the arrival of death”, Orestes wrote on her Facebook wall, surely with the suspicion that she hated walls.
Executive producer and journalist of the program -created in 1991 and disappeared after almost thirty years of broadcasting- Cuba in Focus, of the New York station WBAI/Pacifica Radio-99.5 FM, Sally presented, with her colleague Margaret Gilpin, that Sunday hour of news, events and debates about Cuba and U.S. policy towards the neighboring country, with bold approaches that, paradoxically, did not “fit” in the mainstream media.
She had begun her professional career in 1980, in the news department of WBAI. She was a street reporter, associate news director, public affairs director and executive producer of several programs. In addition, she designed and managed a news department at WOMR-FM in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
An advocate for great causes, her love for the Five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters imprisoned in the United States came naturally to her, so that in 2008 she produced and directed, along with Jennifer Wager, the documentary “Against the silence: families of the Cuban five speak out”.
René, Gerardo, Antonio, Ramón and Fernando were not only defended by a friend, but also by a prestigious professional who stamped her signature, indistinctly, in renowned media such as The Nation, The Guardian, The City Sun and The Advocate.
Sally O’Brien also supported the imprisoned journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal and other fighters in similar situations, some of them real political prisoners in the United States.
On her agenda were constant themes vindicating the struggles of Cubans and Puerto Ricans, a vision that linked her action with the yearnings of the Cuban Revolutionary Party founded in New York by our own José Martí to achieve one independence and help the other.
This special friend also had the energy and wisdom to work for 18 years as an audio engineer at the United Nations radio station.
Such professional, ideological and human attributes nurtured the praise in the official resolution that one day placed on Sally O’Brien’s chest the Félix Elmusa Distinction of the UPEC, the highest recognition that the journalistic guild in Cuba gives to professionals of sustained trajectory and merits.
It is to be imagined that this honor was part of the fuel for the solidarity of the communicator who, in the midst of the most opportunistic media harassment against Cuba, signed in New York, together with other American colleagues, a declaration of support for the Cuban Revolution after the violent events of July 11, 2021 in several cities and towns of the island.
“Ninety miles from the coasts of the United States of America lies the sovereign and independent nation of the Socialist Republic of Cuba,” the document stated on July 13 of that year, making it clear who is free and who is submissive in today’s geopolitics.
And while, now as then, some try to soften or deny the nature of the siege with the term “embargo”, Sally and her colleagues portrayed it as it is: “For more than sixty years, practically since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the United States, through a variety of overt and covert means, has tried to overthrow the Cuban government. The most well known, overt and illegal economic blockade, according to most nations of the world, was through an economic blockade which, according to most nations of the world, is the longest in history”.
The rest of the text can be imagined, but when the friend has left to show solidarity from another dimension, with the legacy she leaves behind, which is no small thing, it is worth remembering how, as a result of that violence, which was strongly encouraged from the North, she and her companions denounced a communicational hypocrisy that is still unhappily intact: “In contrast to the scant media attention given on June 23 to the 184 UN member states calling on the United States to end the U.S. economic blockade against Cuba, Sunday’s protests made newspaper headlines and were broadcast on television screens in the United States and around the world.”
Along with the personal ones, the good dead usually leave collective mourners. On December 31, Orestes Hernández Hernández received an anguished call from Pedro (Shango), her husband: “Sally passed away last night…” and he immediately called from his Facebook page to tell Cuba in anguish: Sally O’Brien has died!
Pedro (Shango), Orestes and Cubans, especially journalists, will fondly remember the woman who became a family of our diplomats in New York and supported with them Fidel Castro’s visit to that city in 2000 for the Millennium Summit.
The couple spent several times in Cuba, where Sally received, in the face of the illness that has apparently overcome her, the love therapies of a land that she cared for, from her breast to her hands, as many times as enemies appeared in the path of the woman and the Island.
Source: Cubaperiodistas, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English