MIAMI, Florida (December 31, 2014)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today called on the Cuban government to release independent journalists and activists jailed yesterday as they were about to take part in an art show in Havana’s Revolution Square to protest censorship.
Remaining under arrest are Víctor Ariel González, reporter, and Claudio Fuentes, photographer, of the online newspaper 14ymedio whose editor blogger Yoani Sánchez, dissidents Antonio Rodiles and Eliécer Ávila, student and activist, and performance artist Tania Bruguera, among others.
Sánchez, IAPA Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information Vice Chair for Cuba, was under house arrest for several hours yesterday. While her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, editor in chief of 14ymedio, was arrested then released in the evening.
Under the slogan “I Also Demand” Bruguera called in social media on citizens to go to the Revolution Square art event to express for one minute on an open microphone their opinion about the situation in Cuba. The event was banned by the government which saw it as a political provocation.
Given the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the governments of Cuba and the United States announced on December 17 the IAPA called on the Cuban government to respect human rights and freedom of expression and of the press. The organization’s president, Gustavo Mohme, editor of the Lima, Peru, newspaper La República, declared, “With this new demonstration of censorship Raúl Castro’s government is losing the opportunity for us to believe that the changes in the island are being taken seriously and will be political as well as economic ones, which in fact is a priority in this new stage.”
For his part Claudio Paolillo, chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information and editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, condemned the arrests and added that “once again the Castro government is mocking the international community and all those who live in the hope of a new Cuba, where the right to express oneself continues to be censored by one of the most authoritarian governments in the history of the Americas.”
The two IAPA officers called for the release of those detained, expressed solidarity with Sánchez and declared that “freedom of expression and of the press, and respect for the rest of human rights, must be a requirement that should be imposed on the government of Raúl Castro and Fidel Castro by democratic countries of the region.”
Journalist and poet Raúl Rivero, like Sánchez, was another IAPA regional vice chairman for Cuba who was constantly harassed. When he was in that role he was held in jail from April 2003 to November 2004. Since then he has been living in Spain to where he went into exile through a safe-conduct agreement between the Spanish and Cuban governments.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
