Cuba
Journalist in Cuba banned from reportingPosted Sep 14 2011
A veteran foreign correspondent has been barred from working as a journalist in Cuba and stripped of his credentials.
Mauricio Vicent, 47, has worked 20 years in Cuba for El País, a Spanish national daily newspaper and Cadena SER, a Spanish radio network.
Though government officials are not asking Vicent to leave the country, they are refusing to renew his work permit, citing that he negatively portrays the editorial stance of the newspaper, according to a report by the International Press Institute.
Vicent’s stories about a political prisoner who died in 2009 after a hunger strike and a protestor who died after he was allegedly beaten by police in May, according to The Miami Herald.
Vicent’s wife is a Cuban citizen and his two children were born in Cuba.
Vicent is not the only journalist suffering from President Raúl Castro’s restraints on the press in Cuba. The Miami Herald reported in a Sept. 6, 2011 article that Juan Castro Olivera, an Argentine correspondent last assigned to the Miami bureau of the Agence France Press, was denied a journalist work visa he needed to report as a foreign correspondent from Havana.
According to The Miami Herald, there are other foreign correspondents who left Cuba because the government withdrew their accreditations, specifically The Chicago Tribune’s Gary Marx and Cesar Gonzalez-Calero of the El Universal newspaper in Mexico. A third correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp., was able to renew his accredidation after it was revoked.
To read the International Press Center in Cuba’s qualifications for working permits as a journalist, visit their site. For an English translation, click here .