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NEWS
Cuba
7 November 2006
Independent
journalist held on “social danger” charge, others harassed
Reporters Without Borders today called for the immediate release of
Guillermo Espinosa Rodríguez, a journalist with the Agencia de Prensa
Libre Oriental independent news agency, who has been held by the state
security police in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba since 25
October. He will probably be jailed as a “danger to society,” making him
the 25th journalist currently imprisoned in Cuba.
The press freedom organisation also condemned a recent wave of other
cases of independent journalists being harassed by Cuba’s political
police.
“Espinosa is likely to get a prison sentence for being a ‘danger to
society,’ in other words, not for any crime he has supposedly committed
but for the threat he supposedly represents,” Reporters Without Borders
said. “His case is a new example of the absurdity of a judicial system
that can convict a person without any grounds.”
The organisation added: “We call for his immediate release and an end to
the repressive hysteria to which other journalists have also fallen
victim.”
The Miami-based news website Cubanet said Espinosa is being held in an
isolation cell at Department 21 of the Cuban state security police in
Santiago de Cuba pending trial on a charge of being a “danger to
society” - a Cuban criminal code provision under which people can be
arrested, tried and convicted for the danger they supposedly pose rather
than what they have actually done.
Harassment of the independent press has increased since the latter part
of October. In one of the most recent cases, Cubanet correspondent
Roberto Santana Rodríguez was arrested with two opposition activists on
2 November in Havana as they left the US Interests Section building,
where they had gone to surf the Internet.
Santana was released after his journalistic material was confiscated.
The state security police previously summoned him for questioning on 13
February and ordered him to put a stop to his journalistic activities.
Ahmed Rodríguez Albacia, a 21-year-old journalist working for the
Jóvenes sin Censura independent news agency, was expelled by Rapid
Response Brigade paramilitaries on 31 October from the eastern town of
Antilla, where he was born, for “speaking ill of Antilla on Radio Martí,”
a US-government radio station based in the Miami area that broadcasts to
Cuba.
He was forcibly escorted out of the town, his tape-recorder and 105
convertible pesos (105 dollars) were taken from him, and he was told he
was banned from ever coming back. Rodríguez was previously arrested on
15 September and held for 48 hours by the political police in Havana,
where he and his family now live since leaving Antilla. On 26 October,
state security police forced their way into the home of Lamasiel
Gutiérrez Romero, the correspondent of the Nueva Prensa Cubana news
website, in Nueva Gerona, on the western Isla de la Juventud, told her
she was forbidden to leave her home and threatened her with imprisonment
if she continues her journalistic work.
Gutiérrez was already imprisoned for five months, from October 2005 to
March 2006, for “resisting the authorities and civil disobedience.” She
has been under virtual house arrest since leaving prison because she has
been constantly harassed by the Rapid Response Brigades.
A state security collaborator, Yosvany Dueñas Rivero, went to the home
of independent journalist Bernardo Arévalo Padrón in the central
province of Cienfuegos on 21 October and told him a state security agent
nicknamed Benavides had been ordered to eliminate him on the basis of
trumped-up charges.
Arévalo was given a six-year prison sentence in November 1997 for
“insulting” the authorities because he called President Fidel Castro and
Vice-President Carlos Lage “liars” on the air on Radio Martí. He was
released in November 2003 on completing his sentence.
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