CUBA
Cuban journalism is going through a painfully precarious time, worn down after 46 years of state control of the media, a violent escalation of repression against independent opinions and imprisoned journalists, and the authorities’ complete indifference to the people’s demands for information.
The situation of two years ago of repression unleashed with a broad deployment of police and summary trials has not ended, and is currently intensifying.
The current picture could not be bleaker. As this report was being finished, Víctor Rolando Arroyo, 56, is languishing in the prisoners’ ward in the provincial hospital of Holguín in the eastern end of the island after a 23-day hunger strike. Arroyo, who was sentenced to 26 years in prison during the wave of repression in the spring of 2003, decided on the hunger strike to protest mistreatment by his jailers, and he has refused medical treatment despite the serious deterioration of his health. After several days in the provincial hospital of Guantánamo he was transferred October 3 to Holguín. His relatives, who have traveled from Pinar del Rio in the far west, have limited access to him.
Cuban authorities have not complied with the recognized international agreements concerning the treatment of prisoners of conscience on hunger strikes.
In Villaclara province, the oldest imprisoned journalist, Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, 62, who was sentenced to 20 years, has been 13 months without family visitors or conjugal visits. From January until a few days ago, he was subjected to a “special increased regimen,” suffering all kinds of humiliation, as reprisals for his writings taken out of the jail and for the actions of his wife, Laura Pollán, leader of the civic movement known as Ladies in White. Police authorities warned Pollán at the beginning of this year that her husband would suffer the consequences if she did not give up her public protests demanding the freedom of prisoners of conscience.
The number of imprisoned journalists increased this period to 26 with the arrest of Oscar Mario González, who has been detained since July 22 without being formally charged, and Albert Santiago Du Boucher, tried and sentenced summarily to a year in jail on August 9 for participating in a routine investigation of a street disturbance.
González, of the Decoro Work Group, was detained near his house because it was assumed that he would attend an anti-government protest in front of the French Embassy in Havana that morning. The authorities have now informed him that he will be charged with violation of the Law for the Protection of Cuban Independence and the Cuban Economy (Law 88), of 1999, which was used to sentence dissidents and journalists in 2003.
On August 9, reporter Lamasiel Gutiérrez Romero, of Nueva Prensa Cubana on the Island of Youth (Isla de la Juventud), was sentenced to seven months of probation on charges of “resistance to order and civil disobedience.” Gutiérrez was arrested by three State Security agents on July 14 when she was preparing to travel to Havana. She was held in a cell for seven hours during the police interrogation.
After releasing six journalists of the so-called Group of 75 under special release for humanitarian reasons last year, the government has stopped granting this benefit. Special release for health reasons is a clause supported by Decree Law 62 of 1987 which provides for serving out the term under house arrest, but it does not grant amnesty or suppression of the criminal punishment.
Two of the journalists who benefited from the special release program, Raúl Rivero and Manuel Vázquez Portal, were able to get permission to emigrate from the Cuban government. Rivero, a vice president of the IAPA Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information traveled to Spain with his family in April. Vázquez Portal went to the United States in June.
The others granted special release—Jorge Olivera, Oscar Espinosa Chepe, Carmelo Díaz Fernández and Edel José Garcia—have been denied permission to leave. The danger of returning to jail if the government decides hangs over them.
Others who left Cuba along with Rivero and Vázquez Portal are María Elena Rodríguez, Claudia Márquez, Miguel Saludes and Jesús Álvarez Castillo, who went to the United States, and Diolexys Rodriguez Hurtado, Belkys Rodríguez Bravo, Isabel Rey Rodríguez and Marvin Hernández Monzón, to France.
Most of those who remain in prison with sentences ranging from three to 27 years are still under a severe regimen, hundreds of miles from their homes and families. There are frequent reports of humiliation, terrible food, lack of drinking water, overcrowding in the cells and placement with highly dangerous common criminals.
A dozen of the prisoners suffer from chronic diseases or ailments acquired in prison. The most alarming cases of ailing journalists in prison without the appropriate hygienic conditions are the following.
--José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, 46, Boniato Prison, Santiago de Cuba. In September he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, in addition to the hypertension and circulatory ailments that he already had.
--Normando Hernández González, 36, was returned to Kilo 5 ½ prison in Pinar del Río after six months of hospitalization for changes in his tuberculosis test (Koch bacillus), intestinal malabsorption syndrome and stomach ulcers.
--Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, 39, Kilo 7 Prison, Camagüey, cardiomyopathy and hypertension, polyneuritis, skin conditions (vitiligo), nervous disorders and the loss of 30 pounds. He was returned to prison at the beginning of June after being hospitalized from March to May. On May 23, while in the prisoners’ ward of Amalia Simoni hospital in Camagüey he was hit, dragged across the floor by guards and threatened with having a new case against him opened for “disrespect for the figure of Fidel Castro.” He was hit at the end of September, which brought protests from fellow prisoners.
--Adolfo Fernández Saínz, 57, Provincial Prison of Holguín, prostatic hypertrophy, hypertension, chronic conjunctivitis, pulmonary emphysema, hiatal hernia and kidney cysts.
--José Luis García Paneque, 40, of the National Prisoners Hospital of Combinado del Este prison in Havana, intestinal malabsorption syndrome and acute depression. He has lost more than 70 pounds since being imprisoned.
--Mario Enrique Mayo, 41, Kilo 7 Prison, Camagüey: hypertension, pulmonary emphysema, gastritis and prostate problems. He has been transferred to different prisons four times in less than three years and repeatedly hospitalized. In July he staged a hunger strike that seriously weakened his health.
--Pedro Argüelles Morán 57, Nieves Morejón Prison, Sancti Spiritus: pulmonary emphysema, generalized arthritis and cataracts in both eyes which have left him almost blind.
--Julio César Gálvez Rodríguez, 61, National Prisoners Hospital of Combinado del Este prison in Havana, hypertension, fatty liver, cervical osteoarthritis, sacrolumbalgia and depression.
--Ricardo González Alfonso, 55, National Prisoners Hospital in Combinado del Este, Havana. He had a gall bladder operation in January; abdominal granuloma, a congenital heart murmur.
--Alfredo Pulido López, 45, Kilo 7 Prison, Camagüey: chronic bronchitis, occipital neuralgia, hemorrhoids and hypertension.
--Omar Ruiz Hernández, 58, Canaleta Prison, Ciego de Ávila: hypertension and widening of the aorta.
--Jose Ubaldo Izquierdo, 40, Guanajay Prison, Havana: acute pulmonary emphysema and digestive disorders.
In the public arena cases of police harassment, reprisals, intimidation with home evictions, temporary detentions and hounding by paramilitary mobs instigated and protected by the police themselves are more and more frequent. The revival of the so-called repudiation meetings (an old method of repression) is the new police method of intimidation in the face of popular discontent.
Dr. Florencio Cruz, a member of Línea Sur Press agency, was detained for eight hours in Aguada de Pasajeros, Cienfuegos on August 8. Medicine and money sent from the United States were confiscated. Carlos Ríos, a journalist of Havana Press agency was detained overnight in Havana on August 22 to force him to give up his professional work.
On September 16, Guillermo Fariñas, who worked with Cubanacán Press agency in Santa Clara, was insulted and beaten in the presence of police officers by a group of pro-government demonstrators when he left a police station.
At the end of March the home of Bernardo Arévalo Padrón, who lives in Aguada de Pasajeros, Cienfuegos, was painted all over by citizens who said they were members of the Communist Party of Cuba. Arévalo continues working for Línea Sur Press agency after serving a six-year jail term for disrespect to Fidel Castro. His efforts to emigrate were blocked when the United States and France refused to give him political asylum, presumably because of his previous ties to the Cuban Interior Ministry.
At the beginning of August, the married couple journalists Luis Guerra Juvier and Aurora del Toro of the Nueva Prensa Cubana agency, were evicted from their home in Camagüey by orders of government officials. The eviction order was based on alleged “counterrevolutionary activities” of the two journalists.
In Las Tunas in the middle of August, Héctor Riverón González of the Libertad agency was summoned by State Security agents to warn him that if he did not take a job he would be arrested and charged under law 88 for his news work.
Throughout the country there are 30 active reporters who work irregularly, supported by agencies, radio stations and publications abroad, such as Cubanet, Nueva Prensa Cubana, Carta de Cuba, Radio Martí, Encuentro en la Red, and other Web sites and local stations in Miami
In the government press, official media outlets devoted a great deal of space to promote the inauguration of channel Telesur on July 24 as a way to “free the media plantation” and to help create an awareness of integration. Cuba is one of five countries sponsoring the television channel, but the government will not even allow the Cuban audience to have access to all its programs. Cubans can only see a one-hour selection of fragments and programs, chosen by official experts in the same way as it is done through program exchange agreements signed with CNN and other foreign television channels.
The strategic alliance of the Cuban media with the official Venezuelan press continues at full speed. After launching the “dual nationality” magazine Patria Grande in February, Venezuela and Cuba signed news cooperation agreement to strengthen links between the Cuban agency Prensa Latina and the Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (ABN). Under the agreement, signed March 23, Cuban journalists will assist in the restructuring and reactivation of ABN and will give advice “on the presentation of news, professional training of Venezuelan staff and instruction in new technologies.
On World Press Freedom Day May 3, the government-sponsored Cuban Journalists Union (UPEC) held a meeting in Havana about “the kidnapped truth.” It analyzed “the historic moment in Latin America and especially Venezuela” and, paradoxically, emphasized that “information is the peoples’ right.”
The alleged anti-terrorist campaign that the Cuban state media say they support in their 548 publications and more than 270 Web pages, is highly questionable when its Web sites published in reaction to the attacks in London in July an article that said: “The attacks in London are the expression of the just anger of those who are martyred. The docile people have decided to stop being docile.” (Lisandro Otero: “The response of the suffering.” La Jiribilla, Week 2-8 of July, 2005.)
The Cuban government has not skimped on threats against foreign correspondents accredited in Havana. It has blamed some for jointing the “electronic war” that tries to present an image of chaos and economic crisis in Cuba.
At the beginning of July, cameramen and reporters, including representatives of CNN, who were covering the “repudiation meetings” at the homes of peaceful opposition figures, were berated and even pushed by angry demonstrators. The police did not intervene. Days later, in a speech for the July 26 anniversary of the revolution, Fidel Castro himself warned against “some foreign correspondent or another in Havana” who has been carried away, consciously or unconsciously, by “the current of provocation and deceit” against Cuba.
Castro also blamed the U.S. government and exiles in Miami for taking advantage of the alleged facilities offered by the Cuban authorities for many international agencies and media companies to have correspondents living and working on the island. He said he regretted that “some really do it in full complicity with the U.S. Interests Section to misinform and deceive the world about the reality of Cuba.”
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