Gerry Hadden has been a writer and foreign correspondent for 15 years.
He started out in 2000 covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for National Public Radio. His assignments have taken him from the sewers (literally) of Mexico City to the halls of power throughout the region. He witnessed earthquakes, coups, struggles for equality, mass immigration, the fall-out in the region following the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. and the beginnings of what would become Latin America’s bloodiest war ever: the so-called War on Drugs. He wrote a memoir about this time entitled Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti.
Hadden first went to Cuba as a music student in 1996, studying folkloric music in Matanzas. He returned several times with NPR, covering lots of topics, from the first sale of U.S. food products to Havana to a visit by President Jimmy Carter to the fate of Russian widows left behind by the Cold War. He, along with a New York Times reporter and photographer, was the first reporter allowed in to Camp Delta, the controversial U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. In 2003 he was asked by NPR to set up a Havana bureau, though the project stalled out following an island-wide crack-down on political dissidents.
In 2004 Hadden moved to Spain to cover Europe for PRI’s The World. Though he never took his eye off Cuba and Cuban affairs, he wouldn’t make it back to the island until joining CCTV America as a correspondent for documentary films, ten years later.
He and his partner live in Barcelona where they run a small circus consisting of three kids and many pets.