Cuba

Bruguera was forced to leave Cuba in 2021 as a result of government pressure and persecution for her artistic work.

Jiménez told CPJ that this was not the first time he has been threatened by individuals with Cuban accents.

In a new report on the second anniversary, PEN International, PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) and Cubalex, profile 17 exiled cultural professionals – demonstrating their resilience – while documenting the repressive and sometimes violent tactics by the Cuban state that forced them to flee.

Freedom House spoke with human rights defender Anamely Ramos González about Cuba’s San Isidro Movement – an art collective that continues to defend Cubans’ right to free expression even after key members were imprisoned.

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) condemns Cuba’s dictatorial regime for its ploy to “legalize censorship” by approving a law that will allow it to strengthen its coercion against press freedom, independent media, and journalists and further restrict citizens’ freedom of expression.

Article 28 of the new law says media are “the socialist property of the entire people or of political, social and mass organisations, and cannot be the subject of any other kind of property.”

María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez is a Cuban poet and activist. On March 10, 2022, she was sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of ‘public disorder,’ ‘assault’, ‘instigation to commit a crime’, ‘contempt,’ and ‘resistance’.

Bestowing this year’s IPFA on Jiménez recognizes that Cuba remains one of the most challenging environments in the Americas for the press.

The report “Prison or Exile: Cuba’s Systematic Repression of July 2021 Demonstrators,” documents a wide range of human rights violations committed in the context of the protests, including arbitrary detention, abuse-ridden prosecutions, and torture.

To mark the one-year anniversary of the J11 protests in Cuba, Freedom House interviews Alessandra Pinna, director of programs for the Latin America and Caribbean region, to discuss what Cubans are doing to secure a freer future and how the international community can help.

CPJ called on authorities to refrain from sentencing freelance journalist Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca to prison, to drop all charges against him, and to release the journalist, who has been held for more than a year in pretrial detention.

Over a dozen human and civil rights organizations have called for the immediate release of Cuban artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel “Osorbo” Pérez, who stood trial on May 30 and 31 on trumped-up charges and have been detained since the summer of 2021.

“Maykel Castillo Pérez and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara are being prosecuted for exercising their human right to criticize their own government” – HRW.

CPJ is alarmed by the passage of Cuba’s new penal code, which further criminalises the work of independent journalists on the island by banning foreign funding and puts their existence and sustainability at dire risk.