MIAMI, United States.- The American journalist Anthony DePalma, former international correspondent for The New York Times, was arrested upon arriving in Havana on a flight from the United States and expelled by the Cuban authorities, reported this Saturday exclusively cybercuba.
According to the report, by Miami-based Cuban journalist Wilfredo Cancio, DePalma, a recognized authority on Latin American issues, “was declared inadmissible in the national territory upon his arrival in the country last Wednesday and returned to the United States on a flight who left at 6:15 pm from the José Martí International Airport, after a prolonged police interrogation.
According to the text, DePalma, 70 years old and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 2001, arrived in Cuba with two suitcases of medicine and humanitarian aid, and several copies of his book The Cubans: Ordinary Lives in Extraordinary Times (2020), “a testimony of recent Cuban life through the voices of five natives of the Havana neighborhood of Guanabacoa”.
“The suitcases were seized and DePalma had to leave Cuba without his belongings,” reads the article.
Jorge A. García, a personal friend of the American journalist and resident in Miami since 1999, recounted on his Facebook account that “upon his arrival at the Boyeros Airport, and while he was showing his passport and legal documents, two officers approached him. in full uniform and they demand that he accompany them to a cubicle and he is interrogated. After several hours of psychological torture, they tell him that he cannot enter the island. And that he would march back to the United States on the next flight.”
Garcia, who lost 14 relatives in the sinking of the tugboat “13 de Marzo” in the bay of Havana on July 13, 1994, said, says Cancio’s report, that “DePalma felt scared at the difficult moment and asked for their suitcases, to which they replied that they were ‘in a safe place’”.
DePalma’s professional career, who had traveled to Cuba on other occasions, “endorses him as one of the most prominent connoisseurs of Latin American problems in journalism in the United States,” says the note.
“After working for 22 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, DePalma continued in journalistic research and also joined teaching as a member of the faculty of the Columbia University School of Journalism,” he adds.
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