droits de l'homme
Cuba reste la deuxième prison du monde pour la presse
En présence de la presse française et étrangère, et de personnalités cubaines exilées, dont des journalistes dissidents, l’organisation a installé, sur la place du Trocadéro, vingt-trois cages, abritant chacune un détenu volontaire, masqué et vêtu d’un costume de prisonnier. Sur chaque cage figurait le nom, le média d’appartenance, la durée de la peine et les motifs d’incarcération de chaque journaliste emprisonné.
“Le cinquantenaire de l’accostage du bateau Granma, le 2 décembre 2006, vient clôturer cinq jours de célébration des 80 ans de Fidel Castro, obligé de céder sa charge à son frère Raúl le 31 juillet dernier pour raisons de santé. Cette célébration devait coïncider avec son retour au pouvoir, compromis par l’évolution de son état. Que le Líder Máximo reprenne ou non ses fonctions de chef de l’Etat, Cuba reste la deuxième prison du monde pour la presse. Vingt-trois journalistes, pour avoir voulu informer hors du contrôle de l’Etat, le payent de leur liberté”, a déclaré Reporters sans frontières.
“Le gouvernement cubain s’honorerait en les libérant, comme il l’a fait le 20 novembre pour l’un de leurs collègues. Nous espérons que les personnalités étrangères, et notamment européennes, invitées aux cérémonies à La Havane, relaieront cette demande. Assumant depuis le 11 septembre 2006 la présidence tournante du Mouvement des non-alignés, Cuba se doit de remplir les engagements qu’elle a pris ce jour-là en matière de respect des droits de l’homme”, a ajouté l’organisation.
Vingt des vingt-sept journalistes arrêtés et condamnés lors de la vague répressive de mars 2003 sont toujours détenus, dont le correspondant de Reporters sans frontières, Ricardo González Alfonso. Accusés pour la plupart d’être des “mercenaires au service d’une puissance étrangère”, ils ont écopé de peines allant de 14 à 27 ans de prison. Enfermés dans des cellules insalubres, parfois mêlés aux détenus de droit commun, ils subissent au quotidien les mauvais traitements de leurs gardiens, les privations de contact avec leur famille et le rationnement des médicaments qu’impose leur état de santé, de plus en plus dégradé. La médecine carcérale a elle-même estimé l’état de santé de ces prisonniers incompatible avec la détention dans la plupart des cas. L’un d’eux, Juan Carlos Herrera Acosta a régulièrement refusé de s’alimenter depuis huit mois pour protester contre son sort.
Trois journalistes sont venus s’ajouter en 2005 et 2006 à cette longue liste : Alberto Gil Triay Casales, Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez et, en mai dernier, Armando Betancourt. Le premier est officiellement inculpé de “trouble à l’ordre public” mais attend toujours sa condamnation. Les deux autres sont détenus sans la moindre charge précise par la Sécurité de l’Etat (police politique). Un quatrième journaliste, Oscar Mario González Pérez, arrêté le 22 juillet 2005 sans motif, a été libéré le 20 novembre 2006 sans plus d’explication. Il aura purgé pour rien un an et quatre mois de prison.
Enfin, le harcèlement, les intimidations et les violences envers la presse indépendante n’ont pas davantage cessé pendant les quatre mois de pouvoir intérimaire de Raúl Castro. A Cuba, un journaliste n’est en liberté que surveillée.
Le 2 décembre 1956, le bateau Granma, en provenance du Mexique, accostait à Cuba, avec à son bord les frères Fidel et Raúl Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara et leurs principaux compagnons de lutte. L’épisode marqua le début de la Révolution castriste et le renversement, trois ans plus tard, de la dictature de Fulgencio Batista. A la veille du cinquantenaire de l’événement, Reporters sans frontières tient à rappeler que, depuis, une dictature a succédé à une autre et manifeste publiquement son soutien aux vingt-trois journalistes détenus dans les geôles cubaines pour avoir voulu informer librement.
Toutes les informations actualisées sur les vingt-trois journalistes détenus figurent sur le site de Reporters sans frontières.
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droits de l'homme
L’organisation internationale contre la torture lance une “intervention d’urgence” pour José Daniel Ferrer
MIAMI, États-Unis.- L’Observatoire pour la protection des défenseurs des droits humains (OPDDH), a lancé ce vendredi une campagne d'”Interventions urgentes” en faveur du prisonnier politique et de conscience cubain José Daniel Ferrer García, leader de l’Union patriotique de Cuba (UNPACU), selon une note de Radio Televisión Martí.
droits de l'homme
Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?
New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio) Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries. They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes
New students at the University of Havana (14ymedio)
Born during the Special Period, they have grown up trapped in the dual currency system, and when they get their degrees Raul Castro will no longer be in power. They are the more than 100,000 young people just starting college throughout the country. Their brief biographies include educational experiments, battles of ideas, and the emergence of new technologies They know more about X-Men than about Elpidio Valdés, and only remember Fidel Castro from old photos and archived documentaries.
They are the Wi-Fi kids with their pirate networks, raised with the “packets” of copied shows and illegal satellite dishes. Some nights they would connect through routers and play strategy video games that made them feel powerful and free. Whoever wants to know them should know that they’ve had “emerging teachers” since elementary school and were taught grammar, math and ideology via television screens. However, they ended up being the least ideological of the Cubans who today inhabit this Island, the most cosmopolitan and with the greatest vision of the future.
On arriving at junior high school they played at throwing around around the obligatory snack of bread while their parents furtively passed their lunches through the school gate. They have a special physical ability, an adaptation that has allowed them to survive the environment; they don’t hear what doesn’t interest them, they close their ears to the harangues of morning assemblies and politicians. They seem lazier than other generations and in reality they are, but in their case this apathy acts like an evolutionary advantage. They’re better than us and will live in a country that has nothing to do with what we were promised.
A few months ago, these same young people, starred in the best known case of school fraud uncovered publicly. Some of those hoping to earn a place in higher education bought the answers to an admissions test. They were used to paying for approval, because they had to turn to private tutors to teach them what they should have learned in the classroom. Many of those who recently enrolled in the university had private teachers starting in elementary school. They are the children of a new emerging class that has used its resources so that their children can reach a desk at the right hand — or the left — of the alma mater.
These young people dressed in uniforms in their earlier grades, but they struggled to differentiate themselves through the length of a shirt, a fringe of bleached hair, or through pants sagging below their hips. They are the children of those who barely had a change of underwear in the nineties, so their parents tried to make sure they didn’t “go through the same thing,” and turned to the black market for their clothes and shoes. They mock the false austerity and, not wanting to look like militants, they love bright shiny colors and name brand outfits.
Yesterday, with the start of the school year, they received a lecture about the attempts of “imperialism to undermine the revolution through its youth.” It was like a faint drizzle running over an impervious surface. The government is right to be worried; these young people who have entered the university will never become good soldiers or fanatics. The clay from which they are made cannot be molded.
Excerpt from:
Who Is Filling Cuba’s University Classrooms?
droits de l'homme
A Caricature of a Cuban Woman
Woman drinking (14ymedio) 14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness
14yMEDIO, Yoani Sanchez, Havana, 22 August 2014 — A woman on national television said that her husband “helps” her with some household chores. To many, the phrase may sound like the highest aspiration of every woman. Another lady asserts that her husband behaves like a “Federated man,” an allusion to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), which today is celebrating its 54th anniversary. As for me, on this side of the screen, I feel sorry for them in the face of such meekness. Instead of the urgent demands they should mention, all I hear is this appreciation directed to a power as manly as it is deaf.
It’s not about “helping” to wash a plate or watch the kids, nor tiny illusory gender quotas that hide so much discrimination like a slap. The problem is that economic and political power remains mainly in masculine hands. What percentage of car owners are women? How many acres of land are owned or leased by women. How many Cuban ambassadors on missions abroad wear skirts? Can anyone recite the number of men who request paternity leave to take care of their newborns? How many young men are stopped by the police each day to warn them they can’t walk with a tourist? Who mostly attends the parent meetings at the schools?
Please, don’t try to “put us to sleep” with figures in the style of, “65 percent of our cadres and 50 percent of our grassroots leaders are women.” The only thing this statistic means is that more responsibility falls on our shoulders, which means neither a high decision-making level nor greater rights. At least such a triumphalist phrase clarifies that there are “grassroots leaders,” because we know that decisions at the highest level are made by men who grew up under the precepts that we women are beautiful ornaments to have at hand… always and as long as we keep our mouths shut.
I feel sorry for the docile and timid feminist movement that exists in my country. Ashamed for those ladies with their ridiculous necklaces and abundant makeup who appear in the official media to tell us that “the Cuban woman has been the greatest ally of the Revolution.” Words spoken at the same moment when a company director is sexually harassing his secretary, when a beaten woman can’t get a restraining order against her abusive husband, when a policeman tells the victim of a sexual assault, “Well, with that skirt you’re wearing…” and the government recruits shock troops for an act of repudiation against the Ladies in White.
Women are the sector of the population that has the most reason to shout their displeasure. Because half a century after the founding of the caricature of an organization that is the Federation of Cuban Women, we are neither more free, nor more powerful, nor even more independent.
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A Caricature of a Cuban Woman