Cuba deports Polish journalist who met dissidents

Cuba deports Polish journalist who met dissidents
Reuters

HAVANA - Communist Cuba deported a Polish journalist on Saturday two days
after police detained her for interviewing dissidents while visiting as a
tourist, a Polish diplomat said.
Anna Bikont, who works for Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's most widely
circulated newspapers, was put on an Air Lauda flight to Milan by
immigration police, said Polish First Secretary Daniel Gromann.
Her colleague and travel companion, Nelly Norton, a dual national
Swiss-Italian psychologist who works as a journalist, was also expelled.
Cuban police seized their notes and deleted pictures from a digital camera,
Gromann said. "They were told they broke immigration laws. Technically they
have been deported," he said. "They said they were treated well."
Cuba requires foreign reporters who enter Cuba as tourists to abstain from
practicing journalism.
President Fidel Castro's government has expelled several European
journalists this year to prevent them from reporting on dissent. In May, two
Italian and three Polish journalists who traveled to Cuba to cover a rare
meeting of pro-democracy activists were deported.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, New York-based group
that works to safeguard press freedom around the world, condemned the
detention of Bikont and Norton.
It said Cuba was one of the world's leading jailers of journalists after
China, with 24 Cuban journalists in jail, most of them since a crackdown in
March 2003 on the independent press and the opposition.

Copyright 2005 Reuters

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