MIAMI, United States. – The Cuban journalist and researcher José Raúl Gallego Ramos denounced this Friday Santiago Lajes Choy, rector of the University of Camagüey (UC) “Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz”, for his role in the repression of students and professors.
“Today the main person responsible for the repression at the University of Camagüey is at the University of Guadalajara (UdG), ” Gallego said on Twitter.
Lajes Choy and Yailé Caballero, UC Director of International Relations, are currently visiting Mexican universities with the aim of expanding student agreements between nations.
“Let the UdG know, if it doesn’t know, that it is rubbing shoulders with systematic repressors of academic freedom and elementary human rights,” warned Gallego, who in 2016 obtained his master’s degree in Communication at the UdG.
The journalist, in particular, made a call to the UG: “It is important that they know that contact with Cuban universities implies potential dangers for the professors and students of their university.”
After his return to Cuba and his reinstatement as a professor at UC, Gallego was sanctioned for collaborating with independent media outlets, and finally reassigned to a position as librarian.
“He has written on a platform called Cuba Possiblewhich does not maintain an editorial line corresponding to the principles of the Revolution… Its attitude directly threatens the ethical and ideological formation of future generations of professionals”, is quoted in the report on the disciplinary measure imposed on Gallego.
Gallego’s case, however, is not isolated: other students and professors from Camagüey were also sanctioned and expelled by the rector of the house of higher studies.
At the end of 2022, the Cuban professor and journalist José Luis Tan Estrada was expelled from the University of Camagüey for his criticism of the La Isla regime on social networks.
“Weeks before, repression and censorship began to haunt me (…). Constant attacks from false profiles on Facebook, smear campaigns in the province, blocking access to various institutional pages in the territory,” denounced Tan Estada.
In 2019, the student Jorge Enrique Cruz Batista was expelled from the same university for painting anti-government phrases “I never belonged to opposition groups or anything like that. I am simply someone who says what he thinks and who wants Cuba to improve. I wrote those posters because I felt sick of seeing so many needs and so many lies,” Cruz Bastista recounted then.
At the same university, the filmmaker Eliecer Jimenez Almeida He was sanctioned and expelled from the Union of Young Communists (UJC) for making a short film critical of the conditions of the health services in that house of higher studies.
