MIAMI, United States. – The journalist Ismario Rodríguez Pérez, audiovisual director of neighborhood journalismwas threatened with going to jail for allegedly “disseminating pernicious and counterrevolutionary information.”
Rodríguez Pérez, who was subjected to a new interrogation by State Security, offered on Twitter details about the fact.
“I got home right at 12:00 [meridiano], everything was more of the same. Three officers, one of them a lieutenant colonel from Villa Marista with the hackneyed speech that [que] I do is illegal and the press is socialist. I refused to sign the warning act for doing journalism,” said the young journalist.
State Security agents also used the cases of Luis Manuel Otero Alcánatara and Maykel Osorbo “as their examples of imprisonments carried out for being intransigent.”
“They threatened me with prison for ‘disseminating pernicious and counterrevolutionary information.’ I told them to prove it”, concluded Rodríguez Pérez.
The regime’s attack on the independent press has intensified in recent weeks. At the beginning of September, the independent medium The touch denounced that the repression of the regime caused the resignation of nine of its journalists.
“We live days of great sadness and indignation. It generates a great emotional conflict for us when team members are forced to stop working, for no other reason than that of unaccountable authoritarianism. Colleagues who have contributed their talent and dedication to making The touch a medium that serves, to the full extent of the word, the Cuban citizenry, today they are forced to abandon the exercise of independent journalism,” the medium said in a statement.
Other reporters from independent publications have also been harassed by the Cuban regime; including Luz Escobar, of 14ymedioand Vladimir Turró Paez and Nelson Julio Alvarez Mairataof CubaNet. Due to the constant harassment of the Political Police, Álvarez Mairata submitted his resignation to this medium at the beginning of August.
Recently, the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press denounced that July has been, so far, the worst month of 2022 for press freedom in Cuba.
In its report, the ICLEP recorded 140 violations of press freedom in Cuba during the seventh month of the year. The NGO recorded 96 cases of arbitrary arrests, 22 restrictions in the digital space and the same number of threats and psychological attacks.
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