Journalism is at a crossroads, with inertia in the official media, repression of the independent press, an indolent attitude toward jailed and sick journalists, and government control at all levels of access to information.
There are no changes after 14 months without President Fidel Castro, whose return to power seems less and less probable. Absent from public life during a long health crisis, Castro has been present in the official media, which have published and broadcast 51 articles since March 29 under the title Reflections.
The journalism environment remains unchanged, in spite of thinly disguised attempts by president Raúl Castro to give the official media an active role in criticism and solutions to economic and social problems.
There are 27 journalists in jail, following the release of two reporters and the arrest of another in the last six months.
On April 13, independent journalist Oscar Sánchez Madan was arrested in a violent police raid in the small town of Pedro Betancourt, Matanzas. He was immediately taken to the nearby town of Unión de Reyes. A few hours later, in a summary trial, he was sentenced to four years in prison on the charge of pre-criminal dangerousness. No relatives or defense attorneys attended the trial.
Terms like pre-criminal dangerousness and crime of social dangerousness are legal weapons to disguise government repression against independent journalists.
On May 8, Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, a reporter for Nueva Prensa Cubana news agency, was freed five days after serving a sentence of one year and 10 months.
On August 20 Armando Betancourt Reina, a journalist who was sentenced July 3 to 15 months in prison in a blatant violation of due process was released. The trial had been suspended several times because there was no formal charge. Betancourt, who worked for the Nueva Prensa Cubana news agency, has been in jail without bail since May 23, 2006, for going to a neighborhood where residents were protesting a forced eviction by Camagüey province officials.
The health of ten jailed journalists has deteriorated, but the authorities have refused to grant them humanitarian release because of their illnesses or, in several cases, because of their advanced age.
Normando Hernández, 39, was transferred September 14 from the Kilo 7 jail, in Camagüey, to Carlos J. Finlay Military Hospital, in Havana, because of his serious health condition. Hernández, sentenced to 25 years, has intestinal malabsorption, hernias and hypertension. Several TB tests have had ambiguous results, and he weighs only 45 kilos (100 pounds).
Cuban authorities have refused to consider the humanitarian visa issued in April by the government of Costa Rica for Hernández and his wife.
José Luis García Paneque, a physician and journalist sentenced to 24 years, was transferred in late June to the hospital of the Las Mangas prison, in the province of Granma. He suffers from anemia and malnutrition because of his intestinal malabsorption syndrome, and his recovery will depend on a strict diet impossible to maintain in a Cuban jail. He was also diagnosed with a kidney cyst and has serious nervous problems. His wife and four sons were forced to leave the island and emigrate to United States early this year because of constant harassment by the authorities and pro-government mobs who called them terrorists serving the United States. His children also were ridiculed by their classmates.
José Gabriel Ramón Castillo, sentenced to 20 years in prison, is jailed in Boniato, in Santiago de Cuba, severely weakened by a cirrhosis of the liver, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Pedro Argüelles Morán, sentenced to 20 years, was hospitalized in April for advanced cataracts in both eyes and is almost blind.
Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta, sentenced to 20 years, has resumed his hunger strike to protest the harsh conditions he is subject to in the Kilo 8 jail in Camagüey. At 41, he suffers from ischemic heart failure, high blood pressure, cervical arthritis, asthma and liver problems.
There is a handicapped man among the jailed journalists: Miguel Galván Gutiérrez, an engineer, sentenced to 26 years.
Of the six reporters of the so-called Causa de los 75 who were granted a special release
for humanitarian reasons, four remain in Cuba. They have refugee visas issued by the U.S., but the Havana government will not let them leave.
Jorge Olivera, one of the journalists who was granted a humanitarian release, was called May 29 to an office of the National Revolutionary Police in Havana, and the municipal court of Old Havana has summoned him numerous times to remind him that he must not attend public events or leave the province where he lives.
The more than 40 independent journalists still working in Cuba face daily repression, ranging from warnings, fines and confiscation of money and personal belongings to raids of their homes, searches, harassment by pro-government mobs and retaliation against their families.
Journalist Luis Guerra Juvier, who was accepted in the U.S. refugee program, remains in a legal limbo. The authorities canceled the exit visas given to Juvier and his wife over a year ago, but officials have not said why.
The government continued its campaign against the proliferation of illegal satellite TV dishes and has intensified its controls limiting Internet connections.
In the last few months several police raids have been reported in Havana neighborhoods against parabolic antennas and the appropriation of cable television signals. Its aim is to dismantle the redistribution centers, confiscate equipment and fine the offenders. Cubans, mainly in Havana, look to these services as an alternative for information and entertainment to the programs of the official media.
From June 27-30, the so-called National Exercise of Cederista Security and Prevention, an operation coordinated by the police, state entities and neighborhood committees to fight alleged crimes and corruption, was held throughout the country The goal of this campaign, which began in 1997, was focused on guards and neighborhood surveillance to coordinate actions to dismantle illegal TV and Internet connections with the help of the National Revolutionary Police and state companies such as ETECSA, the national telecommunications network.
In an attempt to get the attention of a national audience, the Radio and TV Institute (ICRT) initiated 24-hour television programming as a great innovation,.
The Internet is another government concern. The service is limited to state central offices, educational and cultural institutions, and foreigners who pay for it in hard currency. The cost of an hour of Internet access, with an extremely slow connection, varies from US$6 to US$10 in some cybercafés and hotels in the capital..
This year control has been increased at work and student centers. In May, ICRT workers in Havana and provincial offices, received an internal notice banning access to the Yahoo server and all its extensions. The reason given was that Yahoo does not satisfy the petitions oriented to information services and that it interferes with professional work in the ICRT.
In 2003, the Internet connection for newspapers, magazines and all other official media was reduced to an hour a day for each journalist. Use of this time for personal matters or messages was considered a serious disciplinary infraction.
On August 13, an official letter suspended direct access to Internet for journalists of official media and the electronic addresses of the ICRT. The letter suggests that media executives carefully select the people authorized to access Web pages and to check news material.
All the e-mail communications and access to information services now depend on a link to the official site ENET.CU, which permits greater control of users navigation in each press organization.
The authorities this year have outlined the limits of the intranet, which only allows access to pages of Cuban publications and entities, or to those abroad that agree with government policy.
Since early 2007, in numerous university centers and government offices, the Hotmail service of MSN was blocked, as well as the main page of this service.
At least four officials and journalists in the provinces of Camagüey, Las Tunas and Santiago de Cuba have been dismissed for inappropriate use of e-mail and redistribution of improper matters.
Those found guilty of illegally accessing the Internet from home using passwords of state offices may be sentenced to 5 to 10 years in jail.
Nevertheless, in spite of the obstacles, a growing trend is the proliferation of personal independent pages, the so-called blogs, which share the cyberspace with about 50 government journalists.
The independent blogs in Cuba, mostly written under pseudonyms, deal their subjects with confident and caustic references about todays situation in Cuba. The authors connect to the web in private cybercafés or using passwords bought in the black market. Their pages can be found at foreign sites such as Blogspot.com.
The Cuban government continues to act arbitrarily when it comes to issuing visas for foreign journalists who want to travel to Cuba. A reporter and a photographer for the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo were denied visas to cover the visit of President Manuel Zelaya to Havana. Zelaya included in his party a group of journalists who flew in the presidential airplane. El Heraldo was the only Honduran news organization that was going to pay its journalists expenses.
