Tracey Eaton was Havana bureau chief for The Dallas Morning News from 2000 to early 2005.

 A journalist since 1983, he has written some 5,000 articles on everything from Taliban fighters and neo-Nazis to teen-age drug runners and snakes popping out of toilets.

His Cuba blog is called Along the Malecón and contains more than 3,000 original photos.

Eaton travels to Cuba regularly to do freelance stories. Above, he interviews a man in Baracoa in eastern Cuba. Photo credit: Kim Ritzenthaler

Eaton is among only a few American journalists who have operated news bureaus on the island since Fidel Castro took power in 1959.

He has wide experience in Latin America and along the U.S.-Mexico border. He was metropolitan editor for the Houston Chronicle before joining Flagler College in 2007.

Above, Eaton outside the seaside home he rented in Tarara, east of Havana. He had just replaced his Texas license plate with a Cuban plate reading PEXT for Prensa Extranjera, or Foreign Press.

Eaton has been a staff writer at seven newspapers, including the Miami Herald and the Orange County Register.  More than 2,000 of his photos have been published in newspapers where he has worked. His stories have appeared in more than 65 U.S., Canadian and Mexican newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Daily News.

Eaton was a Dallas Morning News correspondent in Mexico City from 1993 to 2000. Above, he poses with Mexican soldiers at a counter-narcotics exercise in Baja California, Mexico

Eaton was awarded a Pulitzer Center travel grant in 2010 for his work in Cuba. He is writing a series of stories about the pro-democracy movement in Cuba. Also in 2010, Eaton created the Cuba Money Project, an independent investigative journalism project.

Eaton’s freelance stories have appeared in the Miami Herald, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Cubaencuentro, Progreso Weekly, CubaNews, Cuba Absolutely, American Rider, HOG and other publications.

Eaton was the writer for one among thousands, a documentary about a Cuban-American musician who returns to Cuba to rediscover his past. The film premiered on Nov. 30, 2009, and was an official selection of the Santa Fe Film Festival.

He holds a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College and a master’s degree in journalism from Temple University. He was a Fulbright scholar in Ecuador and studied at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, or UNAM, in Mexico City.

He has conducted journalism workshops in Guatemala, Bolivia and Nicaragua, and has been an invited speaker at conferences in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and Cuba.  He is a member of Investigative Reporters & Editors, or IRE.

Eaton covered the fighting in Afghanistan after terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Above, he leaves Afghanistan, entering Tajikistan by ferry.

Eaton can be reached at maninhavana@yahoo.com for freelance assignments, workshops, speaking engagements and other work.