Each time I sit in front of the daunting emptiness of a blank page to write about the freedom of the press in my country, I cannot help remembering a phrase I read some time ago in a book written in Prague after the establishment of democracy: "Socialism needs the press but does the press need socialism?"

My experience of living in a socialist country since the age of 12 has provided me with a dismal list of arguments that lets me respond to this question with a resounding No! And since I studied journalism under a socialist regime and worked for many - indeed too many - years with the official media, I also have a lengthy inventory of failures to illustrate the irony of the author's words.

My activities during two decades of working for Cuban newspapers, magazines and government agencies have put me in a particularly suitable position to discuss the lack of press freedom in my country. But what I would particularly like to share is my definitive experience as a journalist working outside state control, beyond the boundaries of the Communist Party, free from the restrictions of a specific ideology.

Ever since we, a group of men and women, began from within to try to make known to the outside world and to large sectors of the Cuban population our vision of reality and our points of view, and to tell with objectivity and professionalism the most relevant episodes in our daily lives, we were outlawed, forgotten, erased as people and, finally, imprisoned.

Because not only is there no press freedom in Cuba; worse still, there is no press. What circulates in the form of newspapers and magazines, or can be heard on the radio and television news, is the view on life that the State, the sole arbiter of truth, thinks fit to impose on the population.

Another specific aspect of present-day Cuban journalism is that people have not yet discovered their right to reply. The press can accuse, slander, and morally destroy people locally and abroad without the victims ever being able to express their point of view.

We ourselves, some 40 men and women committed to the task of drawing attention to the complex problems ailing our society, of exposing its evils and blessings, and blatant inequities, we too have been victims of this absolute power.

What is known as the independent press - eight groups (four in Havana, the others in central and eastern provinces) - has been functioning actively since spring 1995, but some journalists have already had to leave the country, three others have been convicted and two are in prison.

One of these is Bernardo Arevalo Padron, director of a small agency in south-central Cuba, who is serving a six-year prison sentence on the charge of "disrespect towards the person of the Comandante en Jefe". Another is Lorenzo Paez Nunez, correspondent in a region south of Havana, sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for "spreading libellous news".

Yet another is Juan Carlos Recio, a 24-year-old Agencia Cuba Press reporter from north-central Cuba, who was convicted for withholding information from the police about the activities of a local political group. He is serving a 12-month sentence.

This is the grim picture of a country which will soon enter its fifth decade of repression, the same country which in the 19th century gave birth to Jose Marti, an outstanding figure in Latin American journalism. Such is the bleak landscape: one daily national paper, a few national weeklies and one weekly in each of the 14 provinces.

Constantly with the same political rhetoric, the same sweetened vision of Cuban reality, the same journalistic jargon, exultant to the point of inanity, totally devoid of meaning.

The independent press, deprived of fax machines and computers, with constant telephone interference, subject to harassment, carries on trying to open new horizons, new space in which it may be possible for a free press to breathe. In this way we work towards the new millennium, and salute all the journalists in the free world, those in Cuba who still adhere to the official media and sincerely believe that loyalty is not stagnation, and those who here or elsewhere make a point of writing the truth with a view to improving the world in which we all live.

More information about World Press Freedom Day is available from the World Association of Newspapers which has a website at www.fiej.org. The association may also be contacted in writing at 25 rue d'Astorg, Paris 75008, France.