(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 17 August 2001 IAPA press release: IAPA posts on Web site its protest at harassment of Cuban journalists MIAMI, Florida (August 17) – The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today protested new aggressions against the independent press in Cuba in recent weeks, as reported from Havana by journalist Raúl […]
(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 17 August 2001 IAPA press release:
IAPA posts on Web site its protest at harassment of Cuban journalists
MIAMI, Florida (August 17) – The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today protested new aggressions against the independent press in Cuba in recent weeks, as reported from Havana by journalist Raúl Rivero and posted on its Web site – cuba.sipiapa.org.
Rivero, an independent Cuban journalist and resident regional vice chairman for Cuba of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, in addition to reporting the incidents also published an article in which he criticizes the Cuban official press. Under the title “The Red Badge of Boredom” Rivero declares that “the press here is not a passion, it is a political chore with an agenda and its own objectives, and the reporter is not a restless investigator but just one more member of the ranks who serve to shore up an ideology. Cuba has, in this field, qualified and creative professionals who keep quiet in the newsrooms, where loud-mouthed fanatics and verbal henchman abound, professional insulters, card-carrying discrediters, who have never known the risks and the beauty of real journalism.”
The other articles concern an incident on August 5 in which independent journalist Jadir Hernández Hernández was sentenced to house arrest in the town of Guines and the threats he had received earlier, preventing him from working as the correspondent of the independent news agency Havana Press.
In late July and early August three independent journalists belonging to the Manuel Márquez Sterling Journalists Association – Jorge Olivera Castillo, Graciela Alfonso and Jesús Alvarez Castillo – were beaten and interrogated by security agents in a bid to stop them from reporting.
The articles on the Web site cuba.sipiapa.org may be reproduced by the more than 1,300 IAPA newspaper members and other publications with due credit to the source.
