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Honored
reporter locked up in Cuba 3b3k6o
By Hazel Feigenblatt. The
Washington Times, November 21. 2003.
Cuban journalist Manuel Vazquez Portal
will not be available to receive the 2003
International Press Freedom Award that the
Committee to Protect Journalists (J) will
present to him and other reporters on Tuesday.
He is in a prison cell in Santiago de
Cuba, ing time on a dirty mattress without
blankets or pillow under a ceiling that
leaks when it rains and with a toilet that's
more of a "hole regurgitating its stench
24 hours a day."
Mr. Vazquez, 52, writer, poet and founder
of the independent news agency Grupo de
Trabajo Decoro, described the conditions
in a letter from prison in June.
He was arrested in March when the Cuban
government conducted a massive crackdown
on the island's tiny independent press and
other opposition figures.
In April, after a summary trial, Mr. Vazquez
was sentenced to 18 years in prison. Another
27 reporters, writers and activists received
sentences from 14 to 27 years.
Frank Smyth, Washington representative for
J, said there seems to be no reason why
Mr. Vazquez was targeted, but that his opinion
columns have been consistently critical
of the regime.
Most of them have been published in the
Miami-based news Web site CubaNet and, while
in prison in June, his wife, Yolanda Huerga,
smuggled excerpts from his prison journal
that were printed in several publications.
J is demanding that Fidel Castro's regime
release Mr. Vazquez and the others.
The group's executive director, Ann Cooper,
said the award is a way of giving moral
to Mr. Vazquez and other independent
reporters.
The 2003 award also honors the work of
three international journalists and an American
correspondent.
Aboubakr Jamai is the publisher of two
publications in Morocco that investigate
government corruption, corporate impropriety
and taboo political stories.
The government closed both papers in 2000.
When Mr. Jamai relaunched them with new
names, he and a colleague were convicted
of defamation.
Mr. Jamai said the monarchy there concentrates
all power, so everything related to the
government is sacred.
"It's extremely difficult to report.
... To do our job is to defame the king,"
he said.
Another journalist to be honored is Musa
Muradov, editor in chief of Chechnya's only
independent publication.
Two of his reporters have been killed,
and threats have forced him to edit the
newspaper from Moscow.
Another award recipient, Abdul Samay Hamed,
is a writer and publisher in Afghanistan.
He founded an organization to promote writer's
rights and a magazine about political and
social problems. In April, two men attacked
him with knives in reprisal for his criticism
of Afghan warlords.
John F. Burns, chief foreign correspondent
for the New York Times, will receive the
J's Burton Benjamin Award for lifetime
achievement. He has covered war zones as
Bosnia, Afghanistan and South Africa at
the height of the apartheid and has won
two Pulitzer prizes.
The awards will be presented Tuesday in
New York.
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