MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

IPI calls for immediate release of 19 Cuban journalists jailed in 2003

Cuba’s Ladies in White movement staged a march through Havana to begin a week of protest to mark the anniversary of the Black Spring, but were later arrested

Seven years after Cuba’s notorious Black Spring clampdown on independent journalism, IPI (International Press Institute) calls for the immediate release of the 19 journalists jailed in 2003 who still remain in prison, as well as of the six other journalists jailed after 2003.

On 18 March 2003, the government of Fidel Castro launched a crackdown on dissent in Cuba that led to the arrest of 78 political opponents, including 29 journalists. About half of those arrested had organized a petition drive for political and human rights reforms in Cuba. Known as the “Varela Project,” it gathered more than 11,000 signatures and united the country’s small dissident movement into the first major internal challenge to the Communist regime.

Between 3 and 7 April of that year, the journalists were handed down jail sentences ranging from 14 to 27 years under Law 88 for the Protection of Cuba's National Independence and Economy and Article 91 of the Cuban Penal Code, which provides for prison sentences or the death penalty for those who act against “the independence or territorial integrity of the State.”

IPI’s Justice Denied Campaign highlights the case of Omar Rodríguez Saludes, director of the independent news agency Nueva Prensa Cubana in Havana. Rodriguez was arrested on the night of 18 March 2003 and sentenced to 27 years in prison - the longest sentence handed down to any of the 29 journalists arrested in the crackdown.

“The Cuban government must immediately release Omar Rodriguez Saludes and the other journalists unjustly held in Cuba,” said IPI Press Freedom Manager Anthony Mills. “No journalist should be imprisoned simply for doing their job or expressing an opinion”. Rodríguez is currently being held in Toledo Prison, Havana.

On Monday, over 30 members of Cuba’s Ladies in White movement staged a march through Havana to begin a week of protest to mark the anniversary of the Black Spring.

On Tuesday, during a second march, the women were reportedly harassed by about 150 supporters of the Castro government after they shouted “Freedom, Freedom!” in front of the headquarters of the Cuban state journalists’ union.

The Ladies in White is a group made up of the wives and relatives of dissidents jailed in 2003. They have said they will stage marches through the city every day this week.

In September 2009, IPI welcomed an unprecedented ruling by a United States federal judge, who ordered the Cuban Communist Party and the government of Raul Castro to pay a total of 27.5 million USD to the mother of jailed Cuban journalist Rodriguez Saludes in compensation for the emotional distress caused to her by the unjust jailing of her son.

“[Rodriguez’s] treatment and conditions of confinement qualify as torture,” US Federal Judge Alan Gold said on 12 September 2008, when he accepted the arguments of the plaintiff.

“The outrages committed during [Rodriguez’s] detention, the days spent under interrogation in the dungeons of the political police, completely isolated, the summary trial and the atrocious conviction as well as all what he experienced in the past six years of detention, are the arguments filed with the Federal Court of the Southern District of Florida,” Rodriguez’s uncle Miguel Saludes told IPI in a May 2009 interview.

An IPI video featuring interviews with members of Rodriguez’s family and photographs taken by the journalist is a powerful reminder that fundamental rights are still being violated in Cuba.