Posts Tagged ‘Cuba’
January 31st, 2012
A
Cuban journalist is facing more than
ten years in prison for alleged corruption offences. José Antonio Torres, a correspondent for Granma, the party newspaper, in Santiago de Cuba, was detained on 11 March, 2011 after writing two articles criticising a major government infrastructure project. In the articles, Torres said experts undertaking the rebuilding of a key aqueduct intended to supply water to the city’s inhabitants, had claimed that “ineptitude” and “poor workmanship” had caused parts of the aqueduct wall’s veneer to fall off. The journalist also wrote that the project should have been “better planned.” Torres was
initially charged with being an “agent of the CIA” and leaking confidential information abroad.
January 20th, 2012
Dissident Wilmar Villar Mendoza, has
died in a hospital in eastern
Cuba following a 56-day hunger strike. Villar launched his strike shortly after his November arrest, after which he was put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison for crimes including disobedience, resistance and crimes against the state. Fellow opposition activists have claimed mistreatment by the Cuban government contributed to Villar’s death.
January 6th, 2012
Dissident
Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has
appealed to Brazil’s president to help her leave the Caribbean island. A strong critic of the country’s Communist regime, Sánchez has been accused by authorities of conducting a “cyberwar” against the government. Sánchez’s
video appeal to Dilma Rousseff follows her invitation to Brazil to attend the screening of a documentary about press freedom in Cuba and Honduras in which she features. The blogger said she did not expect to be able to leave Cuba without ”high-level intervention”. Migration rules that require Cubans to receive government permission to travel have prevented Sánchez from leaving the country since 2004.
October 11th, 2011
A reporter for an independent news service is
awaiting deportation from
Cuba‘s capital city. Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias of the
Hablemos Press agency is awaiting expulsion from Havana for the ninth time in two years, following a recent crackdown on civic groups and dissident organisations. The journalist was arrested for the fourth time this year on 30 September, and will be deported to his home town of Camagüey. More than 2,500 arrests have been made during the political crackdown, and up to 563 people have been briefly detained or exiled.
September 6th, 2011
The
Cuban government this weekend
revoked the press credentials of journalist Mauricio Vicent, correspondent for Spanish newspaper
El País. Cuban authorities said that Vicent, who has been a reporter on the island for twenty years, had portrayed a “biased and negative image” of Cuba. Since 2007, the Cuban government has prohibited reporting by foreign correspondents from the
Chicago Tribune, the
BBC and Mexico’s
El Universal.
April 6th, 2011
Cuba has
accused a Reuters journalist of collaborating with a US diplomat thought to be a CIA agent. The allegation was made by Cuban state television through a programme “dedicated to uncovering supposed plots against Cuba”.
Dissident
Raul Capote claims that he witnessed a meeting between then Reuters bureau chief Anthony Boadle and Mark Sullivan, who was a diplomat in the US Interests Section in Havana. He was
accused of being a CIA agent in the programme.
March 22nd, 2011
On Monday Cuba accused eminent blogger
Yoani Sanchez of being part of a
“cyber war” launched by America. They allege that the aim of these attacks is to destabilise the communist government in Cuba. Allegations were made against Sanchez in a documentary series accusing the US government of targeting Cuba through “cyber dissident proxies”.
March 8th, 2011
Cuban reporter Pedro Arguelles Moran has been
released from prison on parole. He is the last of the journalists jailed during the 2003 “Black Spring” crackdown to be freed. In April 2003 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison under
Law 88, for commiting acts “aimed at subverting the internal order of the nation”. He was
released as part of an agreement brokered by the Catholic church in 2010.
