**Updates IFEX alerts of 28 and 18 February 2000** (IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 28 June 2000 IAPA press release: ‘Forging Our Own Destiny’ A special report from Havana by Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello MIAMI, Florida (June 28, 2000) – To commemorate the third anniversary of the 1997 publication of a document criticizing the […]
**Updates IFEX alerts of 28 and 18 February 2000**
(IAPA/IFEX) – The following is a 28 June 2000 IAPA press release:
‘Forging Our Own Destiny’
A special report from Havana by Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello
MIAMI, Florida (June 28, 2000) – To commemorate the third anniversary of the 1997 publication of a document criticizing the Cuban government, which was entitled “La Patria es de Todos (The Country Belongs to All), one of its authors, Martha Beatriz Roque Cabello, who was released last month after spending almost three years in prison, comments on the Inter American Press Association’s Web site about standards of living in her country.
She makes her comments in a column, “Just an Opinion,” posted on the site (http://cuba.sipiapa.org), which reveals Cubansâ way of life and the “hopelessness” they face on a daily basis. “The deterioration in the standard of living of certain social strata is certainly alarming”, she writes.
Roque states her views on the opposition within Cuba, the political scene, the difficulty of obtaining essential goods and the social, inter-family and moral upheaval. She concludes that it is up to Cubans themselves to “forge our own destiny”.
On June 27, 1997, the writer, together with human rights activists Vladimiro Roca, Félix Bonne and René Gomez Manzano, issued “La Patria es de Todos”, in opposition to the Communist-led government in Havana.
After being held in custody for 20 months, the four were put on trial in July last year and all were given prison sentences. Three of them have since been released, but Roca remains incarcerated.
Also posted on the IAPA website is a report of a hunger strike being waged by a group of political prisoners at the HolguÃn provincial prison in eastern Cuba in support of independent journalist Manual Antonio González Castellanos, whose books and notes were confiscated by prison authorities on June 25.
González Castellanos, serving a prison term of two years and seven months for showing contempt toward Cuban President Fidel Castro, is now being held in solitary confinement. The hunger strikers are demanding that he be returned to his own cell block.
The IAPA website on Cuba, which can also be visited via the hemisphere free-press organization’s home page, (www.sipiapa.org), features detailed reports from independent journalists working for the Cuba Press news agency, opinion pieces and other material from Havana.
