Cuba // Current

Cuba, flash kidnapping for Sanchez

The Cuba regime denied several times the authorization to Yoani Sanchez to leave the... more

bibabiba
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Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez is beaten by State Security

http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=1123
[From Generacion Y Blog, by Yoani Sanchez]

Near 23rd Street, just at the Avenida de los Presidentes roundabout, we saw a black car, made in China, pull up with three heavily built strangers. “Yoani, get in the car,” one told me while grabbing me forcefully by the wrist. The other two surrounded Claudia Cadelo, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo, and a friend who was accompanying us to the march against violence. The ironies of life, it was an evening filled with punches, shouts and obscenities on what should have passed as a day of peace and harmony. The same “aggressors” called for a patrol car which took my other two companions, Orlando and I were condemned to the car with yellow plates, the terrifying world of lawlessness and the impunity of Armageddon.

I refused to get into the bright Geely-made car and we demanded they show us identification or a warrant to take us. Of course they didn’t show us any papers to prove the legitimacy of our arrest. The curious crowded around and I shouted, “Help, these men want to kidnap us,” but they stopped those who wanted to intervene with a shout that revealed the whole ideological background of the operation, “Don’t mess with it, these are counterrevolutionaries.” In the face of our verbal resistance they made a phone call and said to someone who must have been the boss, “What do we do? They don’t want to get in the car.” I imagine the answer from the other side was unequivocal, because then came a flurry of punches and pushes, they got me with my head down and tried to push me into the car. I held onto the door… blows to my knuckles… I managed to take a paper one of them had in his pocket and put it in my mouth. Another flurry of punches so I would return the document to them.

Orlando was already inside, immobilized by a karate hold that kept his head pushed to the floor. One put his knee in my chest and the other, from the front seat, hit me in my kidneys and punched me in the head so I would open my mouth and spit out the paper. At one point I felt I would never leave that car. “This is as far as you’re going, Yoani,” “I’ve had enough of your antics,” said the one sitting beside the driver who was pulling my hair. In the back seat a rare spectacle was taking place: my legs were pointing up, my face reddened by the pressure and my aching body, on the other side Orlando brought down by a professional at beating people up. I just managed to grab, through his trousers, one’s testicles, in an act of desperation. I dug my nails in, thinking he was going to crush my chest until the last breath. “Kill me now,” I screamed, with the last inhalation I had left in me, and the one in front warned the younger one, “Let her breathe.”

I was listening to Orlando panting and the blows continued to rain down on us, I planned to open the door and throw myself out but there was no handle on the inside. We were at their mercy and hearing Orlando’s voice encouraged me. Later he told me it was the same for him hearing my choking words… they let him know, “Yoani is still alive.” We were left aching, lying in a street in Timba, a woman approached, “What has happened?”… “A kidnapping,” I managed to say. We cried in each others arms in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking about Teo, for God’s sake how am I going to explain all these bruises. How am I going to tell him that we live in a country where this can happen, how will I look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her opinions in kilobytes, has been beaten up on a public street. How to describe the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their enjoyment that I could see as they beat us, their lifting my skirt as they dragged me half naked to the car.

I managed to see, however, the degree of fright of our assailants, the fear of the new, of what they cannot destroy because they don’t understand, the blustering terror of he who knows that his days are numbered.http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=1123 [From Generacion Y Blog, by Yoani... more

UrbanGypsy
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Cuba, sequestro lampo per la Sanchez

Il governo cubano ha negato più volte a Yoani Sanchez il permesso di uscire dal... more

bibabiba
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3 days ago
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Cuban Blogger Yoani Sanchez detained and beaten

I was fascinated by her after the fantastic Vanguard report on Cuba. This is awful.... more

ClaudiaVanDamage
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4 days ago
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U.N. Condemns U.S. Embargo on Cuba

The UN general assembly has overwhelmingly condemned the US economic embargo against... more

The_Global_Report
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6 days ago
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Why gay marriage, getting high, and going to Cuba will soon be legal.

The End of Prohibition "I think this would be a good time for a beer," Franklin D.... more

atomiclegion
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8 days ago
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94 comments

Castro Attributes Cuban H1N1 Presence to American Tourists

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8336322.stm

logicpocket
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10 days ago
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Two weeks later, Darsi Ferrer still on hunger strike

Cuban human rights activist Darsi Ferrer, imprisoned since July 21, is two weeks into... more

Zurama
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14 days ago
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Sean Penn to interview with Fidel Castro in Cuba for Vanity Fair

The actor Sean Penn has flown to Cuba to chase what would be the biggest scoop of his... more

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14 days ago
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Cuban Journalist Jose Alejandro is Silenced

[From Yoani Sanchez's blog Generation Y, from Cuba]

No one knows the mechanisms of censorship in Cuba better than those who write in the few newspapers of national circulation. The press here has been turned into a delicate profession required to measure adjectives, carefully weigh topics and often to hide personal opinions in order to keep a job. It is a life decision to be a journalist for the official media, I know, but I also know some who have been trapped in the twists and turns of complicity, waiting for the day when they can write what they think.

From the Juventude Rebelde newspaper office where Reinaldo Escobar (His blog: http://www.desdecuba.com/reinaldoescobar/) worked until 1988, there is very little left because most of his colleagues now live in Miami, Mexico and Spain. Others have retired from the profession, disillusioned with the aborted glastnost and the consecutive calls for criticism, which ended up being bait for the most daring. José Alejandro Rodríguez survived all this and carried his personal battle into the “Receipt Requested” section where he published readers’ letters with their complaints and questions. Every time I read his crusade against bureaucracy and poor work, I sense the regressive countdown that will probably culminate in his professional silencing.

A few days ago José Alejandro could take no more. He took everything he has accumulated about the “excessive centralization” that the press on this Island is subject to and condemned the secrecy surrounding government decisions. In his article “Against the demons of kidnapped information” he used the language of an honest man who always believed in the possibility of humanizing the current system through the transparency of information. I respectfully differ with him, because what has been built on a foundation of hiding, condemning and filtering cannot survive the clear light that emanates from an incisive and free journalism.

The three pages of his harangue lasted just a few hours on the on-line version of Juventud Rebelde. The article was kidnapped by the shrewd hawks of orthodoxy, who know well the danger of a Nation that begins to learn everything you have hidden.

A copy of the article “Against the demons of kidnapped information” can be read here (In Spanish only).
http://www.cubaencuentro.com/jorge-ferrer/blogs/el-tono-de-la-voz/juventud-rebelde-y-la-informacion-secuestrada

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BBC Latin America (Spanish) on the sudden disappearance of the article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/america_latina/2009/10/091020_cuba_articulo_ravsberg_jp.shtml[From Yoani Sanchez's blog Generation Y, from Cuba] No one knows the mechanisms of... more