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Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Hablemos Press journalist awaits 10th deportation to home town

Hablemos Press journalist awaits 10th deportation to home town
Published on Tuesday 15 May 2012.

Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias, a reporter for the independent news agency
Hablemos Press, was arrested on 10 May and is being held in a police
detention centre in Havana awaiting deportation in three days' time to
his home town of Camagüey for the 10th time in two years.

His sister-in-law, Niurka Caridad Ortega, visited the journalist
yesterday and told Hablemos Press she had "seen him and taken him some
clean laundry, although he said he had stopped eating since Thursday and
was spitting blood. It appears that the stomach ulcer from which he
suffers has worsened."

Reporters Without Borders said: "Calixto Ramón Martínez lives and works
in Havana, where he also has relatives. On this basis, his expulsion to
Camagüey contravenes the relaxation, passed at the end of last year, of
the law on internal migration, which restricted the movement of people
to the capital.

"The free movement of individuals is a basic right which the Cuban
government must acknowledge, particularly if it decides to ratify the
two United Nations pacts on civil and political rights that it signed in
2008.

"Why do the authorities insist in uprooting this man from his everyday
surroundings? Is it because he recently reported, via Hablemos Press,
that Havana was experiencing problems with its water supply? The subject
deserves more than senseless reprisals against the journalist who raised it.

"This deportation – his 10th — would be laughable were it not for the
fact that it exposes the refusal of the government, which claims to be
aware of the need to change the way it governs, to establish an open and
sustained dialogue with civil society."

The press freedom organization also called for the journalist to be
given all appropriate care.

Hablemos Press has recorded just over 1,900 detentions or hostile acts
by the authorities towards dissidents since the start of the year,
including 340 during April. The agency has itself been affected by the
crackdown. Besides Martinez, two more of its journalists, Gerardo Younel
Avila and Magali Norvis Otero, were each detained briefly, on 6 and 9
May respectively.

http://en.rsf.org/cuba-hablemos-press-journalist-awaits-15-05-2012,42626.html

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