Independent Journalist Arrested For Investigating The Case Of Karla Pérez González

Independent Journalist Arrested For Investigating The Case Of Karla
Pérez González

14ymedio, Havana, 25 Havana, 25 April 2017 — The independent magazine El
Estornudo (The Sneeze) has denounced Monday’s detention of its
collaborator Maykel González Vivero. The young journalist was detained
at Marta Abreu de las Villas Central University, while reporting on the
expulsion of journalism student Karla Pérez González.

The digital site asserts that the reporter “did not at any time hide”
that he was investigating on the case. “He managed to interview Karla’s
classmates who voted in favor of her definitive exclusion from Higher
Education, including as Miguel Ángel Castiñeira and Ney Cruz,” the
article said.

However, in the course of the investigation “a number of teachers tried
to confiscate Maykel’s belongings and his tools of the trade.” He was
subsequently “held in a university department until police took him to
the State Security Santa Clara Operations Unit.”

At the Unit, the reporter was subjected to five hours of interrogation
and his equipment was confiscated: a laptop, tape recorder and cell
phone. El Estornudo clarified that the reporter “is not facing any legal
charges, but his devices will be returned to have after the police
penetrate (sic) them and check their contents.”

In October of last year, González Vivero was jailed for three days in
Baracoa, Guantánamo, “for covering as an independent journalist the
passage of Hurricane Matthew through the East of the country,” the
article notes.

The reporter “is not facing any legal charges, but his devices will be
returned to have after the police penetrate (sic) them and check their
contents.”

El Estornudo said that the expulsion of the journalism student was
arbitrary, as was the arrest of Maykel Gonzalez Vivero: “two
unjustifiable abuses that the Cuban government commits, in a manner as
shameful as it is ironic, through one of its centers of higher education.”

On Monday, Karla María Pérez González received the official ratification
of her expulsion from the University and has ten working days to appeal
the decision. The young woman was accused of belonging to the Somos+ (We
Are More) Movement and “having a strategy from the beginning of the
course to subvert the young.”

The case has aroused a wave of outrage and in her favor official voices
have weighed in, such as the singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez,
who wrote in his blog, “What brutes we are, for fuck’s sake, it’s been
decades and we don’t learn.

“It is so clumsy and obtuse what has been done to this girl that
inevitably this will draw attention to the group to which she belongs
and the ideas it defends. I know that they will come out with lists of
links of some of these groups calling them terrorists, etc. But the
damage is already done, because such injustice can only arouse
solidarity,” he said.

Source: Independent Journalist Arrested For Investigating The Case Of
Karla Pérez González – Translating Cuba –
translatingcuba.com/independent-journalist-arrested-for-investigating-the-case-of-karla-perez-gonzalez/