The house was infested with fleas, the plumbing was backed up, much of the furniture was broken and the stench of cat urine filled the air.

Matthew Booth, 34, was lying face-up on the mattress when he was shot in the head early July 30. His 13-year-old daughter told investigators she used a 12-gauge shotgun to shoot him in the face, a crime that her attorney said was precipitated by years of sexual abuse. ...

There was barely enough room to walk through the living room. A beat-up couch, where the girl slept, stood propped up against one corner, its back ripped and its cushions scattered on the floor.

An empty alcohol bottle, beer cans, soda cans, books, a stuffed animal, papers and crumpled-up pages from pornographic magazines cluttered the floor.

A coffee maker and another small appliance sat on the kitchen floor amid dirt, debris and animal feces. A green cat litter box lay on its side. Authorities said animal welfare officers took away an array of animals — including dogs, cats and rabbits — from the house last week.

Several trash-filled plastic grocery bags leaned against the fridge, while larger trash bags brimming with empty beer cans took up space under the kitchen sink. The only items in the freezer were a bottle of vodka, a plastic bag and a small red container.

In one room upstairs was another bare mattress and box spring. Stuffed animals, plastic toys, clothing, and soda cans and bottles were strewn across the floor, along with animal feces.

Several drawings took up one wall. On a piece of paper stuck to the wall was D.H. Lawrence's poem, "Self Pity," which begins, "I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself." Written in marker on the wall was "To live is to suffer" and a line from a Tupac Shakur song, "My only fear of death is reincarnation."

"The morning daylight is his only editor. It is in the mornings when he can truly see his night’s work. He sits with the document and a half empty cup of café cubano brewed with a mixture of last week’s coffee grinds and soy, and he pencils in his edits. He inserts all the r’s and ñ’s by hand. He corrects his spelling. He adds slashes where the old Smith Corona failed to add a space. Right there, with his pencil stub, he edits for grammar and moves words here and there for impact...

...Now, he must travel almost all of Havana looking for a phone owned by a friend to his cause.

His article won’t get Xeroxed or faxed. It won’t get typeset and printed. His article will be read, by him, over the phone a dozen times, perhaps more, with the hopes that the person on the other end of the line in Miami or New Jersey will do justice to his work. Each call is made hoping that the person in charge of monitoring his conversation from some government office in Havana won’t cut the transmission, and turn him in for a pound of rice as reward.

That is the life of the Independent Journalist in Cuba: Clandestine meetings, clandestine writing, clandestine transmissions with clandestine words of a clandestine truth.

There are many journalists from around the world in Havana. CNN is there. Reuters, the AP. They live comfortably in hotel rooms and work in comfortable in air-conditioned offices full of amenities. They have the copy machine. They have the faxes and computers and printers and scanners. They have staff and editors. What they don’t have is the security to report the truth. They trade that truth away, to keep a bureau and a staff. They walk on eggshells when they should be stomping the ground beneath them with integrity and zeal. With the hunger to dig, to dig deep enough to get to the real story that needs to be screamed aloud, at the tops of their lungs, for the entire world to hear.

Yet we hear no screams of injustice from the foreign reporter’s pool in Havana. We hear only the chirping. We here the Polly-wannacrackers of fidel castro’s propaganda machinery. It’s more important, you see, to keep a bureau in Havana, just in case the big story breaks, than to report the obvious failure of a system, and the systematic enslavement of a people.