(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has protested against the Cuban authorities’ confiscation of French journalist Catherine David’s files and photographs. David had entered Cuba on a tourist visa to report on dissidents and the human rights situation. RSF also reiterated its complaints about the limitations on press visas granted to foreign journalists, in effect forcing many of […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has protested against the Cuban authorities’ confiscation of French journalist Catherine David’s files and photographs. David had entered Cuba on a tourist visa to report on dissidents and the human rights situation. RSF also reiterated its complaints about the limitations on press visas granted to foreign journalists, in effect forcing many of them to carry out their work in Cuba illegally.
“In reality, the purpose of this visa policy is to control press reporting and Cuba’s image,” RSF Secretary-General Robert Ménard said in a letter to the interior minister, General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra. “The visa policy constitutes a curb on the freedom to ‘seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,’ guaranteed by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Ménard said, while calling for the immediate return of David’s material.
On 8 October 2002, David, a journalist for the French weekly magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur”, was stopped at Havana international airport as she was going through customs with a friend who is a sculptor and photographer. They were led to a room in the airport’s basement where their bags were searched thoroughly.
All the files on David’s computer were copied. Her audio tapes containing interviews with dissidents and all her notes were confiscated. All of her rolls of film, as well as several books and reports on the human rights situation in Cuba, were also seized. The customs officials also copied all of the pages in David’s address book. In Cuba, Law 88 of March 1999 provides for up to eight years’ imprisonment for any person assisting the foreign news media.
After missing their flight because of the length of the search, David and her companion were finally able to leave Cuba two days later. David’s repeated requests for the return of her material, which she addressed to the Cuban customs agency, have so far been in vain.
Recent unsuccessful requests for press visas include one made in late 2001 by a journalist with the Guatemalan daily “Siglo XXI”, who applied to go to Havana to cover the trial of three Guatemalans facing the death penalty on “terrorism” charges. The Cuban consulate in Guatemala City turned his application down.
