Group says jailed Cuban journalist should be freed

Posted on Thursday, 04.17.14

Group says jailed Cuban journalist should be freed
Report says the reporter was jailed because she wrote about alleged
police abuse.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

Cuban authorities should immediately free a journalist jailed for
reporting on a case of alleged police abuse involving a man bitten by a
police dog, the Paris-based Reporters Without Frontiers (RWF) said Thursday.

Juliet Michelena Díaz, 32, was arrested April 7 because of her reporting
on "a case of ordinary police violence she had witnessed in Havana," and
should be freed, said Lucie Morillon, RWF director of investigations.

Michelena was initially accused of threatening a neighbor, but the
charge was raised to attacking the woman on the day her report was
published, indicating "a desire to silence her and put a stop to all her
critical reporting," Morillon said.

RWF, a non-governmental organization, ranked Cuba 170th out of 180
countries in its 2014 freedom of the press index. Cuba's communist
government controls all newspapers and radio and television stations on
the island of 11 million people.

Michelena, who reports for the independent Cuban Network of Community
Communicators, should be declared a "prisoner of conscience" by the
human-rights group Amnesty International, said CNCC director Martha
Beatriz Roque.

Roque said Michelena and five other CNCC reporters were at a Havana bus
stop March 26 when they witnessed an elite police unit known as the
Black Berets use police dogs to break up a brawl involving two men and
women. One man was bitten on the arm.

Police arrested the brawlers as well as Michelena, four of the CNCC
reporters and several bystanders who had been taking cellphone photos of
the incident in an attempt to seize all the photos, Roque said.
Michelena managed to hide hers.

The independent journalists were freed after a few hours, but police
detained Michelena again on April 2, aware that she had the photos and
was writing a report, the CNCC director told el Nuevo Herald. The report
was published April 10 on the Cubanet website.

A State Security colonel let her go after telling her that he would
handle her case personally, Roque said. Police arrested her again on
April 7, this time on an official charge of threatening a member of a
pro-government mob that had cheered her April 2 detention.

Her trial was initially set for April 10 but was postponed while her
husband, Jose Antonio Sieres Ramallo, tried to find a defense lawyer,
the CNCC chief said. Cuban attorneys know they can get into trouble with
authorities if they defend dissidents.

The CNCC focuses mostly on reporting at the neighborhood level, such as
complaints of broken sewer pipes, long waiting lines at health clinics,
and the collapses of many of Havana's old homes.

The RWF statement noted that independent Cuban journalists are "victims
of constant judicial harassments. The arbitrary detentions have the
objective of destabilizing the journalists and slowing their interchange
of information."

Havana journalist Dania Virgen Garcia was detained for several hours on
Saturday, it added. And when two government TV journalists who happened
to be nearby turned their cameras on the police, they, too, were
detained briefly.

Three other journalists are currently jailed on various charges,
according to RWF: Yoenni de Jesús Guerra García, arrested in October and
sentenced to seven years; Ángel Santiesteban Prats, arrested Feb. 28,
2013, and serving a five-year sentence; and José Antonio Torres, a
Granma newspaper reporter arrested in 2012 and serving a 14-year term.

RWF said it wrote a letter to French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius
before his visit to Cuba on April 10 urging him to take up the cases of
the jailed journalists with his hosts in Havana.

While the European Union is trying to improve relations with Cuba in a
series of negotiations due to start in the next few weeks, the letter
said, "that cannot be achieved at the expense of the journalists."

Source: Group says jailed Cuban journalist should be freed - Cuba -
MiamiHerald.com -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/17/4066053/group-says-jailed-cuban-journalist.html