CUBA

CUBA WHEREAS more than 40 years ago freedom of expression and press were abolished in Cuba when the island's totalitarian government confiscated independent media, ushering in a news blackout in a repressive era which persists to this day four journalists - Bernando Arevalo Padron, Jesus Joel Diaz Hernandez, Manuel Gonzalez Castellanos and Leonardo Varona - are currently serving prison sentences for alleged "crimes" of information since September the campaign of official harassment has grown against independent journalists with the surveillance of Santiago Santana, Osvaldo de Cespedes, Pablo Polanco and Maria del Cannen Carro, who were questioned in their homes or elsewhere faced with harassment and persecution, more than 20 independent journalists have been forced to go into exile over the past six months Law 88 - officially entitled the Law on the Protection of National Independence and Economy of Cuba and known as the gag law - violates Principles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 10 of the Declaration of Chapultepec and these violations severely restrict freedom of the press and expression and impede the right to know THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE IAPA RESOLVES to raise its voice in condemnation of Havana's totalitarian regime, once again reminding its ruler, Fidel Castro, that his endeavor to reintroduce an enslaved Cuba into the hemispheric community of freedom-loving nations is openly at odds with the rest of the hemisphere's values to urge that the hemisphere's governments step up direct pressure on the Cuban government to start respecting the basic rights of citizens to be informed and to disseminate information without fear to ask all the newspapers in the hemisphere and in Spain and Portugal that will send correspondents to Havana to cover the Ibero-American Summit in November to urge their correspondents to visit the independent journalists in Cuba in a show of professional solidarity to urge IAPA members on the occasion of the inauguration of the upcoming Ibero-American Summit in Havana to publish on the front page or other appropriate location articles prepared by the IAPA pointing out the appalling repression to which the people and news media in Cuba are being subjected to instruct the Secretariat to distribute informative material to the media to help them comply with the previous paragraph and to heads of government so they will know about the information to be published.