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FROM
CUBA
Cuban
independent journalist arrested, then freed 1w412e
HAVANA, October 29 (cubanet.sergipeconectado.com) -
Independent journalist Claudia Mrquez
Linares, 26, was released today at approximately
2:00 p.m. after being interrogated for two
hours at a Department of State Security
(DSE) office in the Marianao district of
Havana.
Mrquez was picked up at approximately
11:00 a.m. at the central Havana home of
Laura Polln, the wife of Hctor
Maseda, another independent journalist and
former colleague of Ms. Mrquez,
who was sentenced to 20 years in prison
after the wave of arrests directed against
independent journalists and political activists
in March and April of this year.
Polln said two agents from the
DSE, who only identified themselves as Manuel
and Marcos, drove up and asked Mrquez
to go with them. When Mrquez demanded
to see a valid arrest warrant, the agents
replied they didn't have one, but threatened
to charge her with disobedience, a catch-all
section of the Cuban penal code, if she
refused to accompany them.
The agents took Mrquez to an office
known as Section 21 in Marianao district,
where a DSE captain, well-known to Havana
dissidents who only gives his name as Arams,
was waiting to interrogate her.
At some point, said Mrquez, the
agents told her they had been looking for
her since 6:00 a.m. Mrquez said
she hadn't slept at home, where they first
went looking for her, the night before.
"We burned 50 liters (slightly more
than 13 gallons) of gas looking for you,"
she said she was told.
Mrquez said that during her interrogation,
captain Arams, with officer Marcos
present, told her ("this is a warning,
not a threat," she recalled he said)
that they would not allow another issue
of the independent magazine De Cuba to come
out.
After the March wave of arrests that included
most of the top-level staff of the independent
publication, Mrquez took it upon
herself to revive it. She brought out the
third issue a few weeks ago, listing her
home address as that of the magazine and
personally distributing it, according to
reports from Havana.
During the interrogation, Mrquez
recalled, Captain Arams told her
she was violating Law 88 --widely known
as the "Gag law" and less-widely,
as the "Anti-Helms- Burton" law,
since every section in the law is written
in reference to the U. S. Helms-Burton Act.
Mrquez said she replied she was
aware of that, but that she considered the
law to be illegitimate and therefore invalid.
"Do you love your son?," Mrquez
said Captain Arams asked her at
that point.
Mrquez has a six-year old son with
her husband, jailed dissident Osvaldo Alfonso,
the president of the Cuban Liberal Party.
Mrquez started working as an independent
journalist with Grupo de Trabajo Decoro,
most of whose are now in prison,
at age 21, and took over the direction of
the group in 2002, when its director, Manuel
Vzquez Portal, now also in prison,
stepped aside.
In spite of repeated threats, Mrquez
has continued to file her stories with CubaNet
and writes a column for the San Antonio
Express-News, in San Antonio, Texas.
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