CUBAN WRITERS FIRED FOR “IMPROPER USE” OF THE INTERNET

Award-winning Cuban writers Manuel Garcia Verdecia and Rafael Vilches Proenza have been fired from their jobs and expelled from the writers union for “improper conduct of intellectuals committed to the revolutionary process,” among other charges.

Both writers were sanctioned at the request of the local branch of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba in the province of Holguin, some 400 miles from the Cuban capital.

Garcia Verdecia, former vice president of the local writers union, was expelled from the organization and fired from his job. The reason: “behaving inconsistently with his functions as a leader” and “losing the trust” of the union. Vilches Proenza, also lost his job after security agents monitored his email and found he was corresponding with Cuban writers abroad.

Both writers were put through the same process used by communist regimes throughout the world, including meetings where they were encouraged to admit their “crimes” and criticize their own behavior. In fighting their dismissal, the two sanctioned writers did not assert their rights to free communication. To date, Vilches Proenza has remained silent, and Garcia Verdecia has said he was only offering intellectual critiques to strengthen the Cuban revolution.

Catching these men in their so-called counterrevolutionary acts was simplified by the fact that both depended on the writers union for their Internet access, which is both scarce and expensive on the island. The writers union operates its own cybercafé, open only to members, who pay hourly fees and must agree to abide by an ethics code. That code specifically bars visiting any web sites which might “represent a threat to socialist values.”

Until Tuesday, the writers union official site had not published anything about the case. It came to public attention, however, through Holguin poet Luis Felipe Rojas, who dared to post a report on his blog, “Crossing the Barbed Wire.”

While Cuba rejects its inclusion on the list of countries which limit freedom of the press (along with Burma, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria and others), the fact that Rojas’s courage, or folly, was not matched by his sources, all of whom asked to remain anonymous, comes as no surprise to independent journalists, writers, artists and bloggers in Cuba. In recent months, the regime has extended an ever-widening net of repression against these independent voices. Their actions have ranged from terminating previously state-sanctioned email accounts, to expelling professors from the universities, to arrests and detentions, and even to kidnappings and physical assaults as a “warning” against continuing to freely speak one’s mind.

For now, it is unknown whether Garcia Verdecia and Vilches Proenza will legally appeal the punitive measures taken against them by the writers union in Holguin.