Global Journalist

Never give in

By Pablo Alfonso Posted Jan 1 2004

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Almost a year after the March arrest of about 75 dissidents and independent journalists, following with sentences ranging prison sentences ranging from 15 years to life, the balance of Cuba's clampdown against the opposition doesn't seem very positive for its government.

The increased repression hasn't managed to discourage the internal dissident movement. At the same time, international reaction has been raised against the Cuban government in Havana. On Oct. 3, in a daring challenge to the government's repression that imprisoned 42 members of his organization, wave of arrests, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, opposition leader and president of the Movimiento Cristiano Liberación (Christian Liberation Movement) delivered 14,384 signatures to the National Assembly of People's Power (Cuba's Parliament) in Havana. The signatures supported the Varela Project, a referendum initiative seeking democratic changes such as freedom of association, freedom of the press and free elections.

“Many of these signatures were collected after the repressive wave. They are duly organized and certified. This way, we want to say that hope is born. Cuba needs change, and there is a citizen vanguard front line willing to do it,'' said Payá, awarded in 2002 with the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

Two days after Payá handed the signatures to Cuba's Parliament, Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuban minister for Foreign Affairs, described the petition as “Payasearía” (buffoonery) during a press conference in Havana.

In May 2002, on the eve of former U.S President Jimmy Carter's historical visit to Havana, Paya delivered 11,000 signatures to the Cuban National Assembly to be considered as petition for a referendum. The Cuban government responded by carrying out a massive petition that mandated the Assembly to declare the current political system in Cuba “irrevocable.'' The recent crackdown on the opposition shows that after almost 45 years in power, President Fidel Castro, now 77 years old, is far from softening his regime.

Among those arrested in March 15, there are 28 independent journalists linked to diverse agencies established in the past years all over the country. The majority of them are not professionals in the field of journalism, but rather communicators who have become reporters in their daily work.

For Cuba's government, they are “mercenaries” in the service of the United States. In the sentence record of each one of them, crimes represented are possession of books and magazines, fax machines, some computers, telephones and tape recorders; all seized after searches of their homes.

“At first, there was a certain paralysis, but the independent journalists continued working, and the dissidence little by little has been reorganized,” said Blanca Reyes, wife of renowned poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Reyes said that despite the international repercussion elicited by the imprisonments inside Cuba “there are many people who have not even heard of these arrests.”

Although Reyes goes out and talks with a lot of people, most of them are unaware of the dissidents' imprisonment. “That proves the extent to which information is controlled here, or better still, the extent of how misinformed we are here,” she emphasized.

However, on Sept. 18, the movement of independent journalists released the third issue of the bimonthly magazine De Cuba. Its 62 pages are dedicated to the imprisoned dissidents.

The publication, printed with minor technical expertise by the banned Society of Journalists Manuel Márquez Sterling, was made with the collaboration of a small group of journalists who kept some equipment, like typewriters, and have had access to copy machines. The society, which counts on 53 members on the entire island, sponsored the bimonthly edition of De Cuba starting last December. They managed to release two editions before Cuban authorities unleashed the repressive campaign in March.

“We already have managed to release 400 copies of this issue,” said Claudia Márquez, a member of the editorial board. “It has took us two whole months (July and August) dedicated to this, without a budget, which has cost us an enormous amount of work,'' said the journalist, who also serves as vice-president of the Society Márquez Sterling. “This edition confirms the commitment that we, independent journalists, have to freedom of the press in Cuba,” she said.

In the magazine, Ricardo González Alfonso and Raúl Rivero still appear as director and adviser, respectively, despite the fact that both are serving 20-year prison sentences. Márquez and Tania Quintero are listed as part of the editorial board; other collaborators use pseudonyms.

Márquez writes for the independent agency Cubanet news on the Internet and regularly pens a column in the newspaper San Antonio Express News. On Oct. 31, Márquez was arrested and held for two hours. She told Agence France-Presse that she had been taken to the 6th Police Unit, where she was told that she could not publish further issues of De Cuba. “They said I would have to face the consequences if I did.” The police also told her she had not been arrested as a threat but as a “warning” to her not to work as a journalist anymore. She said on her release, however, that she would continue to do so. Married to Osvaldo Alfonso, a dissident sentenced to 18 years of jail, and mother of their six-year-old son, Márquez has had few visits with her husband.

“Visits are quarterly, because my husband, like so many others, is in what they call a program of greater enhanced punishment that lasts at least two years.”

The dissidents' relatives say that the government has shown no mercy sending the prisoners to remote penitentiaries hundreds of kilometers from their homes, in a country where transportation is almost nonexistent. The prisoners are put under a “regime of maximum strictness” and are locked in small cells. It is difficult to send and to receive correspondence. The majority cannot make telephone calls. They only receive 30 pounds of provisions from relatives during those long quarterly periodsm, and some are allowed to receive them only every four months. Food is scarce and sometimes bad spoiled; potable water is nonexistent or contaminated. They complain about their limited access to medicines, even those offered by their relatives, and the bad medical attention received by those who those who are very ill, or even hospitalized.

In August, the terrible prison conditions led journalist and writer Manuel Vázquez Portal, among other political prisoners, to declare a hunger strike in the prison of Boniato, Santiago de Cuba, while the journalists Adolfo Fernandez Saínz and some of his imprisoned colleagues did the same in the Holguín Penitentiary. More hunger strikes followed in October with little effect on their prison conditions.

However, the repressive wave against the dissidents has had a high political and diplomatic cost for the Cuban government.

The European Union (EU) has been particularly critical and has demanded that the Cuban government unconditionally releasethe dissidents the dissidents, whom Amnesty International declared prisoners of conscience. In September, the European Parliament condemned the human rights situation in Cuba and urged President Castro to release the political prisoners. EU legislators approved a joint resolution that criticizes “the constant and flagrant violation of human, civil and political human rights and the fundamental liberties of members of the Cuban opposition and independent journalists.”

Also numerous professional and human rights organizations have demanded the freedom of the prisoners and have expressed solidarity with them. These organizations include the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the Inter American Press Society, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

But, so far, the Cuban government has ignored all the international calls for the release of dissidents or for the consideration of their health conditions.