There are good reasons why the Americas stand in stark contrast to much of the rest of the world, where the Committee to Protect Journalists' 2015 census reports nearly 200 journalists imprisoned.
The following is a CPJ blog post by By Alexandra Ellerbeck/CPJ Americas Research Associate:
When a prison guard told Ángel Santiesteban Prats that he would be released from jail on a scorching summer day in July, the Cuban independent writer and blogger decided to ignore him, brushing off the news as a cruel joke. By then, Santiesteban had already spent two years and five months in prison, half of his five-year sentence, on trumped-up charges of domestic abuse. But Santiesteban, who had been jailed in reprisal for the critical blog Los Hijos que Nadie Quiso (The Children Nobody Wanted), was unexpectedly paroled a few hours later.
Cuba, which had been in the early 2000s one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, has abandoned its policy of lengthy incarcerations of independent journalists and bloggers, according to CPJ research. And this is one of key reasons why, for the second time since CPJ began compiling annual prison surveys in 1990, not a single journalist in the Americas was in jail for work-related reasons on December 1.
