Alberto González Casals, director of the Cuban International Press Center (CPI), has been incorporated by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FDHC) in your database of repressors.
In a statement issued this Thursday, the Miami-based organization details that González Casals has been included as a “white-collar repressor” and as an “export repressor.”
The first, for being “directly responsible for executing the orders of the Ministry of the Interior regarding the withdrawal of credentials to work in Cuba from journalists of the Spanish agency EFE“and the second,” for having been part of Cuba’s intervention in Venezuela, helping Havana to reorganize the intelligence and counterintelligence services of that country in its favor. “
They also detail that González Casals, head of the foreign press within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 2017, is a lieutenant colonel of the Intelligence Directorate who has worked “with diplomatic coverage in countries such as Angola, Venezuela and the United States.”
The Foundation recalls that last November 13 Five members of the agency were summoned to the CPI to withdraw their permission, arguing that EFE “had put its editorial line at the service of the counterrevolution.”
“The CPI, in the best Stalinist tradition violating international human rights conventions, filters foreign journalists and discards the accreditation of those it considers critical”
What bothered the Cuban government was actually, in the FDHC’s opinion, that the Spanish agency, “complying with its obligations of journalistic objectivity, had covered the historic protests of July 11 and 12 in Cuba and was already covering the preparations for the march that had been called for November 15 “.
The NGO asserts that the reprisals against EFE are part of the “information blackout” imposed by the regime after the 11J demonstrations. “The information blockade includes more censorship of the official media, additional pressure on foreign correspondents accredited in Cuba and more reprisals against the independent press,” said the Foundation, to which it adds selective or total cuts of the internet service within the island. .
“The CPI, in the best Stalinist tradition violating international human rights conventions, filters foreign journalists and discards the accreditation of those it considers critical,” the statement said. “To carry out journalistic work in Cuba, it requires a D-6 visa that can be suspended, revoked or not extended, including expulsion from the country of the correspondent if he considers that he has carried out ‘actions that are inappropriate or unrelated to his profile and work content, as well as when it is considered that he has lacked journalistic ethics and / or does not conform to objectivity in his offices’ “.
The Foundation denounces this strategy of the Díaz-Canel government, while it hopes “that EFE will not bend to it or close its presence in Cuba.”
A few days ago, the database of repressors had been updated with the names of a dozen prosecutors, as well as a judge, who participated in the trials of the 11J protesters, which will conclude tomorrow in several cities of the country.
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