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It's Thursday, and that means it's time for the Public Eye Chat. This week's subject is Havana-based producer Portia Siegelbaum. You can read excerpts, and listen to the full interview, below.

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Click here to listen to the interview.

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Brian Montopoli: You wrote a piece for us last year in which you mentioned that your cell phone cut out for 20 minutes when Fidel Castro's illness was announced. Do you think that the government is playing close attention to you and the other foreign reporters there and keeping tabs on what you're up to?

Portia Siegelbaum: Oh, absolutely. I think they're very concerned, and when they're making an announcement they know is breaking news, they're clearly watching. And I will tell you that every time that there is something that they hope will be reported on, or hope that it won't, they're monitoring. They're monitoring the wire stories, they're monitoring all the print media, and the television and radio also.

Brian Montopoli: Do you ever feel the threat of censorship?

Portia Siegelbaum: Well what they do here, and they just did it recently, is they yank the credentials sometimes of foreign press. And so you know that if you go out and do something they really don't like – usually on a consistent basis. They normally will not yank credentials if you write one story they don't like. They might call you in.

Brian Montopoli: How hard has it been to get good information about Castro's health?

Portia Siegelbaum: It's almost impossible. The government has not been very forthcoming. The only information that we've received recently that we can actually cite has been from him. There are other sources who give us information. It's hard to get some things confirmed by more than one source, and I don't want to report something that I know only from one person or maybe two. Because it could be speculation. There's a very tight circle of silence around him. So it's quite difficult.

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Information about Cuban President Fidel Castro’s illness and temporary handover of power to his brother has slowed to a trickle lately. And that makes tales of how reporters operate in this tightly controlled regime all that much more intriguing. Producer Portia Siegelbaum, who is based in Cuba, gave us a first-hand account of her experiences covering the country for CBS News back in August, when news of Castro’s condition first broke. Her first line pretty much said it all: “There are no rules or guidelines for covering the news in Cuba except a really big one: If the government wants coverage, you’ll get access. If they don’t you won’t.” In next month’s issue of American Journalism Review, Lori Robertson takes a more detailed look at the situation for reporters in Cuba. She begins with some scenes from Havana's José Martí International Airport on the evening of August 2, where many of the reporters who arrived there to cover one of the biggest stories to befall the Cuban nation were told to go home, they wouldn’t be getting the necessary visas to remain in the country. That was just one example of what has become one of the most frustrating beats in the business, writes Robertson:

For decades, journalists have been trying to cover a country, whether from somewhere on the island or from afar, that is as frustrating an assignment as they come. It's tough to get in, to get an interview, to get "it" – an entire country filled with people wary of talking to anyone about how they really feel. The small group of foreign journalists who live there struggle to build trust with sources – and find sources they can trust. Others fly in on weeklong or shorter visas or work the phones, reporting methods that are never ideal for penetrating anyplace, let alone a venue as elusive as Cuba.

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We haven’t heard much about Cuban President Fidel Castro’s condition since the announcement last week that he was provisionally transferring power to his brother Raul while Fidel underwent surgery for intestinal bleeding and recovered. Indeed, gathering the facts about what’s going on behind the scenes of a tightly controlled Communist regime is not easy, as CBS News producer Portia Siegelbaum, who is based in Cuba full time, is well aware. Here, she describes the challenges in covering the biggest story out of the island since the Pope’s visit there in 1998 – a story that the Cuban government was much more enthusiastic about sharing with the world.

There are no rules or guidelines for covering the news in Cuba except a really big one: If the government wants coverage, you’ll get access. If they don’t you won’t.

Case in point: Fidel Castro’s sudden mysterious illness and his temporary handing over of power to his long-designated successor Raul Castro just a week ago. As some anticipated the worst, media interest almost mirrored in size the Pope’s visit to the Communist island in 1998.

Then, the government threw open the doors to 2,000 journalists—more than 1,000 of them from the U.S., along with an army of engineers and crews. The networks got carte blanche to bring in microwave systems, uplinks, computer networks, and even golf carts to zip around town. They stuck all their gear on a barge that sailed across the Florida Straits into the Port of Havana.

That’s not the case now. From the moment Castro’s operation for intestinal bleeding was announced on the evening of July 31, a thousand journalists from nearly every continent applied for press visas to enter the country. All were turned down.

So hundreds sneaked in. Without gear. Even a reporter’s notebook tucked in a pocket raised suspicion.

Some reporters from papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are “undercover” in the Cuban capital. Dozens more hung out for days at the Cancun, Mexico airport hoping to slip in as tourists. Some, mostly Japanese, sneaked in past the Cuban censors only to face a dearth of information and the threat of deportation should they file stories. A team from a local Miami TV station made it as far as Havana’s Jose Marti International airport only to be stopped by immigration officers and put on the next flight out.

This left us, the press corps, on long-term assignments in Havana. We’re a small group. There are only four American outlets officially here. CNN, the Associated Press, and two newspapers, The Sun Sentinel of South Florida (which, to their chagrin, had no correspondent here at the moment the story broke) and the Chicago Tribune. The Dallas Morning News closed their Havana bureau last year for budget reasons.

The three major American networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, are here under a wink and a nod from island officials.

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