Cuba

CUBA Cuba has also begun to shut down or curtail publications it has controlled for years, with the pretext that the Soviets are cutting down paper shipments. The publisher of the samizdat magazine Franqueza, Samuel Martinez Lara, has been detained at the State Security Headquarters in Villa Marista since March 10. Mr. Martinez Lara, who is general secretary of the Human Rights Party, has been subjected to continued psychological abuse. The human rights activist Tania Diaz Castro was arrested last March for writing a letter to the United Nations Human Rights Commission that visited Cuba, congratulating it for voting in favor of a resolution that demanded closer accounting from Cuba in human rights cases. She was arrested and under interrogation from March until August, when she appeared on television to accuse the United States Interest Section in Havana and the German Embassy of conspiring to provoke the numerous asylum seekers in Havana during the summer. The only samizdat publication that circulated with official knowledge, Religi6n en Cuba, published by Enrique López Oliva, ceased publication during the summer after L6pez was advised that it would be contrary to his safety and health to continue publishing. Juan Mayo Mendez,a 30-year-old university professor, was arrested in January and sentenced to six years in jail in August for disseminating enemy propaganda. He was accused of writing "Down with Fidel Castro" in his native city of Las Tunas. He is now in the Boniato Prison. Ernesto Bonilla Fonseca, a 47-year-old electrical engineer, has been sentenced to three years in jail for disseminating oral propaganda. He is in the Las Mangas prison, in Bayamo. Agustin Figueredo is also in Las Mangas prison, being held without trial, also accused of divulging enemy propaganda for writing political signs on the walls of schools in Manzanillo. The state attorney is calling for a 12-year sentence in his case. Roberto Luque Escalona, a Cuban writer, has been fired from his job as an editor at the University of Havana after his book was published in the United States. Hubert Jerez Marino, the president of the banned Association of Independent Cuban Journalists and a former writer for Verde Olivo and Bohemia, is in solitary confinement in the Kilometer 7 jail in Camaguey as punishment for writing poetry and letters to U.S. relatives and friends. He has lost access to pencil and paper, and has suffered long periods without food, rest and exercise. Elizardo Sanchez Santa Cruz is in the Aguica jail in Matanzas. He is now in the jail infirmary. Of the three men, Hiram Abi Cobas is in worst shape. He is in the hospital of the Combinado del Este jail. He appears to have lost his mental faculties, has been in a deep depression for months and is physically very weak. These three men, recipients of the 1990 IAPA-Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Award, were sentenced to two years in jail after they spoke to correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times about the trial of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, who was executed in July, 1989. Beginning October 1, Granma became a five-day-a-week newspaper except in Havana, where it will continue to publish six days a week. Juventud Rebelde and Trabajadores are going from dailies to weeklies. Basti6n, the newspaper of the Armed Forces, was shut down. Bohemia is down to 64 pages. The provincial newspapers will continue to publish, but all other magazines and publications were abolished. The announcement by Granma indicated that as paper becomes available again, some scientific journals and textbooks will get priority allocations, but not other publications. Many journalists and other employees are being reassigned to non-writing jobs elsewhere. According to the Granma story, "there was widespread support from the working journalists for these measures," Juventud Rebelde occasionally published objective, even daring, articles by Cuban standards. In the magazine Revolución y Cultura of the Writers and Artists Union, there were occasional articles outside of the offiCially-approved political lines and the beginning of a philosophical debate could be detected. The only known samizdat is Criterio Alternativo. It has been published for the past six months. It circulates as mimeographed and photocopied copies with articles from the inteligentsia on the economy, politics, social problems and the upcoming 4th congress of the party. Cuba continued to restrict the ability of journalists to cover news. Pablo Alfonso, a Miami Herald Journalist who was accredited by the United Nations to cover a UN congress in Cuba, was expelled from Cuba last August when it was determined that he was a Cuban native. The UN protested the matter to the Cuban government. Cuba issued strict regulations September 2S defining the rights and obligations of foreign journalists in Cuba. Hector Argiles, director of the Foreign Ministry's International Press Center, told Reuters it was the first time since Cuba's 1959 revolution that such regulation had been comprehensively drawn up. He added the initiative had nothing to do with the current situation in Cuba. The new regulation barred anyone who entered Cuba as a tourist from working as a journalist. In September, the Cuban government called upon developing nations to express their problems and needs with their own voices. Cuban Vice President Carlos Rafael Rodriguez said the need for a new "objective, balanced and just" world information order was as pressing as the need for a new world economic system.