As the world celebrates International Journalists’ Day this Monday, Silvia Ivón Albelo Medina, PhD in Communication Sciences, recipient of the Ramal Journalism Award for Lifetime Achievement, Journalistic Merit, and other recognitions, is one of those women who embodies courage, dedication, and passion for her work, reaffirming in every act of her life that she is an example of perseverance and commitment.
I remember that when I started working at Radio Rebelde in 2013 as a correspondent for the Cuban capital, she was my guide in how to channel my reporting work; it’s a school where you never stop learning. She once confessed to me that she had learned dedication and commitment from her mother.
With more than twenty years of experience at the station and 15 as Chief Reporter and Correspondent, Ivón Albelo Medina describes Radio Rebelde as her second home, where she spends most of her time. The truth is that for Ivón, her years at Rebelde have served as a platform for her to accompany and integrate into her own family environment.
“Rebelde has given me the opportunity to contribute to Cuban radio the knowledge I gained from working at the station,” she said. She adds that, from a personal perspective, she has learned a lot about interpersonal relationships, because these are the foundation of a good relationship with your source, which will bring veracity to your journalism, helping you stay on top of what’s most important every day: your coverage, the news, and the desire to build trust as a professional and as an institution.
Ivón also talks about her family. This is when her eyes soften and her words blossom. She expresses her eternal gratitude for the protection of her home, for the care of her rearguard, for the support that has enabled her to dedicate herself to Radio Rebelde, about which she says without any modesty: “It’s the most important radio station in Cuba, and that’s what I owe myself; to fulfilling that mission, that’s why I spend hours and hours here organizing, working… and I never tire.”
Albelo Medina never rests when he gets home, while José, her life partner, takes on the household chores. She turns her home into a newsroom for Radio Cubana, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
She’s a woman who gets angry at what’s done wrong; it runs in her blood. Simplicity, honesty, sincerity, and revolutionary and communist activism are values deeply rooted in Silvia Ivon. Her greatest pride is that many professionals have been her students, and she has become a great master of journalism and information.
The journalist affirms that Rebelde’s great challenge is to surpass itself, and that is very difficult. For this reason, the renowned journalist explains, for several years we have been working on an integrated writing practice in which journalists must constantly double ourselves, creating audio and video for the web, using social networks like X and Facebook to express our own thoughts on an event, and generating news content.
However, she confirms that the most important thing, more than technology, is creativity; it is the individual and their ability to learn new things to master technology, and not vice versa. To the extent that studying and understanding technology allows you to do new things so that your communication products have an impact, are heard, and manage to attract an audience, then we will have a new radio station.
