Speech in Cuba - A Freedom under Threat

Speech in Cuba: A Freedom under Threat / Luis Felipe Rojas

Luis Felipe Rojas, 20 May 2016 — Every day it becomes more dangerous.
Engaging in speech and dissent in Cuba is still like a throwing a rock
against the door of Castroism.

After their cell phones were returned to them, Pastor Mario F. Lleonart
and his wife, Yoaxis Marcheco, found their Twitter accounts had been
disrupted. The two had been taken far from their home in Villa Clara and
kept for four hours in a patrol car.

Yoandris Veranes, a citizen journalist and activist with the Cuban
Patriotic Union, sent me a hastily written note from Contramestre in
Santiago de Cuba telling me that the police were preventing him from
going to public internet bureaus. They did not want him showing tourists
a Contramaestre different from the one they were showing tourists.

Serafín Morán, a freelance journalist who does daring reporting without
a playbook, has been taken several times to police headquarters in
Havana. The last time he was detained was a few days after foreign media
had covered a public protest by pedicab drivers in the Cuban capital.

Morán had taken up a collection from donors around the world to buy a
house for an adolescent, Abraham, who had written on social media that
he had never had access to sanitary facilities to take care of
physiological needs. This caused a stir and Morán found himself set upon
by thugs dressed in police uniforms.

Recently, on the Radio Martí program Contacto Cuba, Rolando Rodriguez
Lobaina stated that twenty photo and video cameras were seized from his
production company, Palenque Vision, that its reporters been arrested
and beaten, and that others had left the profession due to disruptions,
attacks and acts of repudiation organized by Cuban State Security forces.

Something similar happened to Roberto de Jesús Guerra Pérez of Hablemos
Press. Agency property was confiscated, arrests were made and its
citizen journalists fined and/or imprisoned.

The regime, in the person of Raul Castro and his lackeys, want to shut
you up.

The Revolution's bigwigs want to sip mojitos while watching cruise ships
docked in Havana Bay to the sound of maracas and do not want anyone
interrupting their Guantanamera, which few remember… or care about.

Muzzling the dissenting voices of Castroism amounts to merely shoveling
dirt on that idyll that was once a military revolution and is now
nothing more than a disguise, a fashion show catwalk, a mockery of
decent people.

Source: Speech in Cuba: A Freedom under Threat / Luis Felipe Rojas –
Translating Cuba -
http://translatingcuba.com/speech-in-cuba-a-freedom-under-threat-luis-felipe-rojas/