The Continuous Black Spring

BY: THE HILL


After the Black Spring, Cuba's new repression


When the last of 29 journalists jailed in a notorious 2003 crackdown was finally freed this year, it signaled to many the end of a dark era. But Cuban authorities are still persecuting independent journalists through arbitrary arrests, beatings, and intimidation. A CPJ special report by Karen Phillips

In Cuba, the Ladies in White were instrumental in drawing attention to the plight of political prisoners. Here, they hold a photo of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died in custody. (AP/Javier Galeano)
Published July 6, 2011

Juan González Febles, director of the independent news website Primavera Digital, was running an errand last spring when he came upon a news story: Police were climbing onto his neighbors’ roofs in Havana to remove satellite television dishes that the government considers illegal because they pick up uncensored stations from abroad.

When Febles started taking pictures with his cell phone, officers quickly arrested him and took him to a neighborhood police station, where he was held for seven hours and made to erase all of his photos of the dish seizures, a highly unpopular police activity. Febles, a former librarian who took up independent journalism in 1998 and now runs the overseas-hosted website, told CPJ that he has become accustomed to detentions, which number in the dozens over the years, but that he is still bothered that his phone is tapped and that he’s followed by security agents in the streets. The agents sometimes stop him, Febles said, and relay what they’ve heard in his private phone conversations.

Stories of prison and liberation Such is the state of repression in Cuba today. As President Raúl Castro’s government seeks greater international engagement, it has freed in the last year more than 20 imprisoned independent journalists and numerous other political detainees who had been held since the notorious Black Spring crackdown of 2003. Government officials talk of political and economic reform, pointing to a plan to introduce high-speed Internet service to the island this summer. But though the government has changed tactics in suppressing independent news and opinion, it has not abandoned repressive practices intended to stifle the free flow of information.

A CPJ investigation has found that the government persists in aggressively persecuting critical journalists with methods that include arbitrary arrests, short-term detentions, beatings, smear campaigns, surveillance, and social sanctions. Today’s tactics have yet to attract widespread international attention because they are lower in profile than the Black Spring crackdown, but the government’s oppressive actions are ongoing and significant.

CPJ examined government activities in March and April 2011, two months with sensitive political milestones, and found that journalists were targeted in more than 50 instances of repression. The majority of cases involved arrests by state security agents or police officers, according to CPJ research and documentation by the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation and Hablemos Press, a news agency that focuses on human rights. Most frequently, these journalists were detained on their way to cover a demonstration or political event and were held in local police stations for hours or days. In at least 11 cases, the arrests were carried out with violence, CPJ research shows.

During this period, more than a dozen journalists endured house arrest, preventing them from reporting on the Communist Party Congress in April and the eighth anniversary in March of the Black Spring crackdown that led to the imprisonment of dozens of journalists and dissidents. Although no journalists have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the last year, Cuban authorities in May ominously sentenced six political dissidents to prison sentences of two to five years.

“Political repression in Cuba has undergone a metamorphosis,” said Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz, president of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation. “Before, repression was based on long prison sentences. Although the Cuban government still subjects dissidents to jail terms, it has changed substantially from the Black Spring, which was characterized by long-term sentences.” More typical now, he said, “are many arrests by the political police, lasting hours, days, or weeks.”


Febles, in back, and colleague Luis Cino work in the makeshift newsroom of Primavera Digital. (Courtesy Febles) Perhaps counter-intuitively, the scheduled arrival of broadband Internet is not expected to improve free expression or access to information. Because the project will improve the island’s relatively few existing Internet connections—which are predominantly in government offices, universities, and other officially approved locations—but not extend connectivity to the general public, the government and its legion of online bloggers will gain an even greater technological advantage over critical voices. Independent journalists will be forced to continue to use expensive Internet access at hotels, pirated connections bought on the black market, or the politically-tinged access offered at foreign embassies.

“Official bloggers already benefit from free or low-cost Internet connections,” said Laritza Diversent, a lawyer and an independent blogger. “Now, they will have the advantage of a high-speed connection as well.”