Cuba's Long Black Spring

If you don't know them, change that today: Citizens for the Protection of Journalists, a professional organization and non-profit I joined almost a year ago when I first came across one of their reports on human rights abuses.

Today's focus at their monthly luncheon was on Cuba's policy on independent journalists. In March 2003, the government went after and arrested 75 dissidents, 29 of whom were journalists, and 20 of whom remain behind bars in sub-human conditions five years later.

While the Spanish government has worked to release many of them, the American government remains mostly silent on the topic. While it is better to get them released, the speakers at today's luncheon suggested that neither the Spanish policy of engagement with Cuba (which on the one hand encourages Cuba's employment of dissidents as human bargaining chips) nor America's economic embargo serves as a model response to Cuba's human rights violations.

For more details on what CPJ has uncovered and recommends, see their report, Cuba's Long Black Spring, available on their website, at CPJ.org.