A court in Havana, Cuba, sentenced ex-journalist and businessman Sebastián Martínez Ferraté to seven years in prison for the corruption of minors, reported AFP.
Julio San Francisco, part of the Cuban Movement for Independent Journalism, narrates the creation and disappearance of the first private and independent news agency on the island, Havana Press, in a new digital book.
The freeing of all Cuba's imprisoned dissident journalists in recent months generated expectations about a possible relaxation of strict censorship rules and zero tolerance for opposition under the more than 50 years of leadership by the Castro brothers in Cuba. However, freedom of expression organizations are denouncing a new wave of attacks on independent Cuban journalists, an indication that nothing in fact has changed and the regime of censorship is continuing, according to news reports.
The award-winning Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, who writes the blog Generation Y, has published a book about how to maintain a blog under conditions as adverse as those that independent journalists face in Cuba.
Cuba is one of the top two nations in the world with the worst record of forcing journalists into exile, said the Committee to Protect Journalists in a new report.
On June 14, when Ernesto Che Guevara would have turned 83, his widow, Aleida March, decided to release the previously unpublished journals the Argentine revolutionary wrote about the Cuban revolution, reported UPI. The journals are part of a series of tributes to his journalistic work, in particular his work for the magazine Olive Green, which he founded, according to Prensa Libre.
Knight Fellows at Stanford University recently discussed digital initiatives in the Americas, including a plan to improve communication among Cuban bloggers, a proposed web portal to help Latino teens become better informed, and an online "toolkit" to help journalists cover Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
Coinciding with a call by international organizations for increased freedom of expression on the Internet, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report urges governments to support internet use as a human right, GigaOm reports.
Spain announced that it has been negotiating on behalf on one of its jailed citizens, journalist Sebastián Martínez Ferraté, to determine why he has been held for 10 months in a Cuban prison without being formally charged, the Associated Press reports.
Even as the number of Internet users continues to grow, Internet freedom is increasingly threatened, and countries such as Venezuela, Jordan and Russia are especially at risk, according to a new report from Freedom House.
Less than two weeks after the last Cuban journalist was released from prison, opposition reporters have denounced new acts of repression and intimidation from the authorities.
Dissident Cuban journalist Albert Santiago Du Bouchet, who had been in jail since 2009 for defamation, was freed by the Cuban authorities and exiled to Spain, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reports. The government had already released the journalists who were among the 52 dissidents jailed during the 2003 “Black Spring” crackdown.