Cuba's daily paper Granma reported last week on the first armed robbery since the triumph of the 1959 revolution, six weeks after it took place.
Cubans have yet to be told that two of their countrymen were sentenced to death a fortnight ago, after pleading guilty to involvement in the murder of four foreign tourists.
Ever since Fidel Castro seized power in a popular revolution 40 years ago, the control of information has been a crucial element in sustaining power.
Just a month after the barbudos (bearded ones) marched into Havana, Dr Castro launched "Operation Truth" in which 300 journalists from around the globe were invited to Cuba to see for themselves whether babies were boiled alive and intellectuals confined to re-education camps.
Dr Castro also financed Prensa Latina, an international press agency set up to combat Reuter and other agencies perceived as agents of the State Department, faithfully reproducing every US allegation against his regime.
The press agency secured the collaboration of the region's finest journalists (including future Nobel prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez) and often whipped rival agencies, but was criticised as a "tool of the revolution".
"Every news agency answers to some state or financial interest," responded Mr Rodolfo Walsh, Prensa Latina's second in command. "The difference is that the dominant countries forbid dependent countries from enjoying the same luxury."
A flourishing open press lasted until the threat of US invasion led President Castro to adopt a wartime attitude to information, announcing strict parameters on freedom of expression: "Within the revolution everything, outside the revolution nothing."
As Cuba's survival became more precarious, all dissent was defined as "outside the revolution", a policy which led to the silencing of all critical voices.
Today Cubans can read two meagre newspapers, Granma and the weekly Trabajadores (Workers).
Cubans have established their own information network, "Radio Bemba", a word-of-mouth blend of rumour and fact about issues of daily survival, such as the price of potatoes or rum on the black market.
"I heard something about those guys," said one Cuban, of the two men condemned to death, "but I thought they had killed eight people."
The Internet age has presented new problems for the Cuban government, which provided excellent informative web pages for overseas sympathisers, while blocking efforts to gain Internet access at home.
The selection and timing of information supplied through the national media is crucial to Dr Castro's policy-making. Over the past two months, he has focused on the sudden increase in crime, described as "a threat to the pillars of the revolution and the success of the tourist industry".
Dr Castro declared a crackdown on crime, launching a new police force and urging judges to adopt the "maximum severity". When the media go public with the death sentences, his crackdown will look visionary, rather than a reaction to events.
While Cuba's state network of non-information frustrates and censors, the exiles in Miami take Dr Castro's delirium a step farther, bombing and killing anyone who dares suggest dialogue with the island. The moderate Miamibased Replica magazine was bombed in 1994, while death threats have forced dozens of people to leave the city.
The "free press" has used its own version of Radio Bemba to undermine Dr Castro, giving prominence to reports of an alleged operation for brain damage carried out on the Cuban leader in October 1997. It emerged that on the day Dr Castro was supposed to have taken seriously ill, he had spent six hours conversing with the papal representative, Dr Joaquin Navarro, information readily available to the world press. The subsequent clarifications were treated as less important than the original allegations.
The distortion of information on both sides of the Castro divide has left one part of the world viewing Cuba as a prison without a roof, while true believers insist that Cuba's political system is popular and that journalists enjoy being censored.
Cubans themselves are fed up being treated by "Grandfather" Castro as small children, unable to assimilate information critical of their government.