Mónica Baró Challenges Arleen Rodríguez's Assertions on Cuban Journalism: "She Knows She's Lying"

Cuban journalist Mónica Baró has sharply criticized Arleen Rodríguez Derivet following her comments during an interview with Rafael Correa on the program "Conversa con Correa," aired by Russia Today in November 2025.

In a video shared on her Facebook page, Baró reacted to a segment where Rodríguez claimed she was trained in "truthful journalism" under the inspiration of Fidel Castro. Baró, an independent journalist, dismissed these statements as false, contrasting them with her own experiences within the Cuban state media system.

"What bothered me the most about Arleen Rodríguez's interview with Rafael Correa on Russia Today was her discussion about journalism. She spent most of the interview, if not half of it, talking about journalism. She described how she became the deputy director of Mesa Redonda, a project initiated by Fidel Castro, who was always so concerned with ensuring the truth about Cuba was known, and she joined that project. Today, she remains the deputy director and part of the team chosen by Fidel," said the exiled Cuban journalist.

In the excerpt highlighted by Baró, Rodríguez stated, "But the principle Fidel always told us, do you know what it was? Putin mentioned it at the twentieth anniversary of RT as the strategic weapon: the truth. Fidel said, 'the truth is overwhelming; no one can overcome it.' Indeed, that was historically his fundamental weapon. He told us, 'speak about what you think is important on these topics, but if you got it wrong because you read something that wasn't entirely true, come back the next day and apologize. The truth is the most important.' And that's the journalism I was trained in, the journalism of truth."

Baró responded with a direct critique: "What irritates me the most about those statements by Arleen Rodríguez regarding journalism, among other things she said throughout the interview, is that she knows it's a lie. Because there is no education in truthful journalism in Cuba."

She recalled studying journalism at the University of Havana between 2007 and 2012. Although she was introduced to international icons like Kapuściński, Günter Wallraff, Gabriel García Márquez, or Pablo de la Torriente Brau, her professional experiences confirmed her suspicions about censorship. "I was verifying what I had already seen before entering the career, which was essentially censorship," she stated.

After graduating, she completed her social service at the magazine Bohemia, where — according to her account — she realized "there was no room within the state-controlled partisan press model, completely subordinate to the party, for journalism to exist and flourish." During that time, she encountered Rodríguez "in various meetings and coverages where the Central Committee was essentially dictating what we had to do and how journalists had to work."

"So, it infuriates me to see how she lies so blatantly in that interview," Baró concluded from Miami.

Baró's comments follow another controversy stemming from the same conversation between Rodríguez and Correa, where Rodríguez attempted to justify the island's power outages by saying, "José Martí never knew electric light." The former Ecuadorian president interrupted her with disbelief: "But Arleen, we're in the 21st century."

Those remarks sparked a wave of criticism and jokes on social media, where numerous users pointed out that Martí did indeed know and write about electricity, as seen in texts like the introduction to La Edad de Oro. Now, Mónica Baró's video adds a new chapter to the ongoing discussion about the role of journalism in Cuba and the use of Fidel Castro's image as a reference within state-controlled media.