Amnesty International Urgent Action - Cuban Journalist threatened and attacked: Roberto de Jesús Guerra

Document - Cuba: Journalist threatened and attacked: Roberto de Jesús Guerra

 

Amnesty issues Urgent Action for Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez,

UA: 159/14 Index: AMR 25/001/2014 Cuba Date: 20 June 2014

 

URGENT ACTION

journalist threatened and attacked

 

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, director of the independent news agency Hablemos Press has been receiving threatening telephone calls and was assaulted on the streets of Havana, the capital. He believes these are attempts by the Cuban authorities to dissuade him from continuing his activities as a journalist.

 

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, founder and director of the independent news agency Hablemos Press (Let’s Talk Press) has been repeatedly receiving threatening telephone calls since 6 June. Different male voices have called his mobile phone and the landline at his home, which also doubles as the office of Hablemos Press, and have threatened that Roberto will be killed.

Just after 11am on 11 June Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez was walking in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución in central Havana on his way to use internet facilities at the Czech Embassy. He was attacked without warning by an unknown individual who started to punch and kick him, leaving him with a broken nose and bruises all over his body. As he was being beaten four men on two motorcycles which are typically used by the Cuban Department of State Security pulled up beside him. Roberto stated that one of the men said “ok, that’s enough” (ya, ya, no le des más) before they drove off. Roberto recognized one of the four men as someone who had participated in repressing demonstrations by dissidents. Roberto and his wife filed a complaint against the attack at the police station in the Cerro municipality of Havana. Roberto was called back to the police station later that night where he identified his attacker from photographs he was shown.

At around 6pm on 17 June the same man who attacked Roberto shouted threats outside his house, including that he would kill Roberto and set fire to his house. Roberto’s wife returned to the same police station to file another complaint but they refused to take it and told her that they had no grounds for complaint (“la denuncia no procedía”).

 

Please write immediately in Spanish or your own language:

Calling on the Cuban authorities to immediately investigate the assault on 11 June against Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez as well as telephone threats against him and to bring those found responsible to justice;
Calling on the authorities to ensure that citizens who seek to peacefully exercise their right to freedom of expression, assembly and association are able to so without harassment or intimidation

 

PLEASE SEND APPEALS BEFORE 1 AUGUST 2014 TO:

Head of State and Government

Raúl Castro Ruz

Presidente de la República de Cuba

La Habana, Cuba

Fax: +41 22 758 9431 (Cuba office in Geneva); +1 212 779 1697 (via Cuban Mission to UN)

Email: cuba@un.int

Salutation: Your Excellency

Attorney General

Dr. Darío Delgado Cura

Fiscal General de la República,

Fiscalía General de la República,

Amistad 552, e/Monte y Estrella,

Centro Habana,

La Habana, Cuba

Salutation: Dear Attorney General

 

And copies to:

Interior Minister

General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra

Ministro del Interior y Prisiones

Ministerio del Interior,

Plaza de la Revolución,

La Habana, Cuba

Fax: +1 212 779 1697 (via Cuban Mission to UN)

Email: correominint@mn.mn.co.cu

Also send copies to diplomatic representatives accredited to your country. Please insert local diplomatic addresses below:

Please check with your section office if sending appeals after the above date.

 

URGENT ACTION

journalist threatened and attacked

Additional Information

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez has faced constant harassment from the authorities. He has been arrested on several occasions and threatened with prison sentences if he continues his activities as a journalist. On 6 April 2014 Roberto de Jesús Guerra was detained for six hours by police after he arrived at Havana airport following a trip abroad. Material he was carrying was confiscated, including documents from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington where he had attended an audience on 25 March in relation to freedom of expression in Cuba. On 11 September 2012 Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez was forced into a car and reportedly beaten as he was driven to a police station. Before being released, he was told that he had become the “number one dissident journalist” and would be imprisoned if he continued his activities.

The news agency Hablemos Press (Let’s Talk Press) is an unofficial Cuban news agency founded in February 2009 by independent journalists and human rights activists, “for the purpose of gathering and disseminating news within the country and for the rest of the world” according to their website. Hablemos Press also produces monthly reports on the arbitrary detention of independent journalists, human rights defenders and political activists.

Restrictions on the Cuban media are stringent and pervasive and clearly stop those in the country from enjoying their right to freedom of opinion and expression, including freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The state maintains a total monopoly on television, radio, the press, internet service providers, and other electronic means of communication.

Article 53 of the Cuban Constitution recognizes freedom of the press but expressly prohibits private ownership of the mass media: “Citizens have freedom of speech and of the press in keeping with the objectives of socialist society. Material conditions for the exercise of that right are provided by the fact that the press, radio, television, cinema, and other mass media are state or social property and can never be private property. This assures their use at exclusive service of the working people and in the interests of society. The law regulates the exercise of those freedoms”.

Although there is no censorship law that explicitly regulates the functioning of the press or establishes what is published, journalists must join the Cuban Journalists Association (Unión de Periodistas Cubanos, UPEC) in order to practice journalism in the state-owned media. UPEC is self-governing; however, in its statutes it recognizes the Cuban Communist Party as “the highest leading force of society and of the state” and agrees to abide by Article 53 of the Constitution (see above). Compulsory membership of a professional association for the practice of journalism is an unlawful restriction on freedom of expression and a violation of the right to freedom of association. Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that, “no one may be compelled to belong to an association”. In the particular case of UPEC, whose members are employees of the government of Cuba, compulsory membership is a means of exerting political control in the field of communications. Only journalists expressing views in line with official government policies are accredited by UPEC; independent journalists are barred from joining.

Name: Roberto de Jesús Guerra
Gender m/f: m

UA: 159/14 Index: AMR 25/001/2014 Issue Date: 20 June 2014

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AMR25/001/2014/en/365f332d-b96b-42c7-9d4a-8ba1f490ea19/amr250012014en.html

Opposition leaders remain jailed and independent journalist beaten up

Antúnez and Yris still detained

Taken at 6am from their home yesterday morning.

Tonight  Yris Tamara Pérez Aguilera, and Jorge Luis García Pérez "Antúnez" continue in regime custody. The Miami Herald's Juan Tamayo reports:

Cuban police and State Security agents were still holding dissidents Jorge Luis García Pérez and his wife Thursday, one day after they raided their home to roust them out of bed and paint over anti-Castro graffiti scrawled on the front walls.
García, known as Antúnez, and his wife, Yris Pérez Aguilera, “were taken from their beds yesterday, without a chance to put on any decent clothes or comb their hair or anything,” said Donaida Pérez, the sister of Yris.
The raiders broke down the door, searched the house and for about the 10th time in the last few years painted over the anti-government graffiti that the couple paint on the front of their home in the town of Placetas, east of Havana, Pérez added.
Among the more outspoken of Cuba’s dissidents and leaders of the National Civic Resistance Front Orlando Zapata Tamayo, García and Pérez have been detained by police dozens of times, although usually for only a few hours.

The pattern of repression yesterday in Cuba led to the question "Is there a nationwide crackdown underway?" The answer a day later is yes. According to UPI "over 40 pro-democracy activists, including four leaders of the movement, were detained by police in Cuba in a crackdown on dissidents." Ed Adamczyk's report was published by UPI on  June 12, 2014 at 2:31 PM and also noted that:

"Although most detainees were released later in the day, the scope of the police action suggested the Cuban government is turning to tougher and more violent means of repression. A journalist, Roberto de Jesus Guerra, claimed a Cuban State Security plainclothes agent attacked him as he walked to the Czech embassy in Havana to use its Internet connection. He later said in an interview, "I am going to the doctor now and later to the police to file a complaint, although they never do anything because they are the ones beating us." Prominent dissidents Jorge Luis García Pérez, known as Antúnez, and his wife, Yris Pérez Aguilera, were taken from their home in Placetas. Also among those detained were Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White protest movement, and her husband, Angel Moya, a dissident who previously served eight years in prison."

 Juan Tamayo, in The Miami Herald article offers additional information on the detention of Berta Soler and Angel Moya: 

Berta Soler, leader of the dissident Ladies in White, meanwhile, said she and her husband, former political prisoner Angel Moya, were detained for 15 hours Wednesday in a police station to keep them away from a planned dissident gathering.
She was kept in an office, forced to sit in uncomfortable chairs, while Moya was held in a cell where he could rest in a bunk bed, Soler added. Police detained them as they left their Havana home at 7 a.m. and freed them at around 10 p.m.
Soler said they were detained on their way to a gathering of the Ladies in White and other dissidents who wanted to attend the trial of Fernando Ortiz, the husband of Yanelis Cutiño, a member of the women’s group who has accused him of domestic abuse.
At least 30 other Ladies in White and 15 to 20 male dissidents were detained by police and State Security agents at they approached the courthouse, Soler said.

 Please keep you eye on the fate of these activists.

Oslo Freedom Forum 2013 Challenging Power: Voices from Cuba and China

Oslo Freedom Forum Logo

"When I was 14, I was at a barrio meeting, organized by the Cuban communist party. The delegate was saying that "we should be grateful with the revolution for the food they sell us monthly through the rationing card." I got back to him complaining that "5 pounds of rice and 10 ounces of beans were not enough to live." Days later I was convicted for pre-criminal social dangerousness, along with 196 other teenagers in the region. I was sentenced to a year and a half of forced labor in a government sugar cane plantation. My story was never published in the media." -Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez, Oslo Freedom Forum 2013

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez

Reporting from an Island Prison

Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez is a Cuban independent journalist and founder of the Hablemos Press news agency. He currently directs the agency, the same group for which journalist and former prisoner of conscience Calixto Martinez reported before his arrest in 2012. In 2005, Guerra was arrested while on hunger strike to protest the Cuban government’s harassment of independent journalists. Guerra was sentenced to a year and ten months in prison for “public disorderliness." He was released in 2007, and has continued with his work as a journalist, despite ongoing beatings, harassment, and detentions.



 Two years ago on this day, my family and I were living under house arrest and brutal torment. One year ago, we were at the hospital in Beijing, extremely anxious and fearful. Today, I stand here freely, speaking before you. Although we have no sure answers about what the future will bring next year on this day or perhaps years from now, one thing is sure: the wheel of history turns unhindered, whether the oppressors will it or not. ... However, these truths are immutable: all authoritarian regimes crumble and all empires founder in the tides of history. -Chen Guangcheng, Oslo Freedom Forum 2013

Chen Guangcheng

China's Inevitable Transformation

Chen Guangcheng is a blind Chinese civil rights activist who has worked on human rights issues in rural areas of China. A self-taught legal worker, Chen faced a series of prison sentences and periods of house arrest after organizing a landmark class-action lawsuit in 2005 against Chinese authorities for excessive enforcement—including forced sterilizations and abortions—of the country’s one-child policy. After a trial in which his attorneys were prevented from entering the court, Chen was charged with “damaging property and organizing a mob to disturb traffic" in retaliation for his advocacy. In April 2012, Chen escaped from house arrest and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. He now lives with his family in the U.S. and is a visiting scholar at the New York University School of Law.