Luis Felipe Rojas
If you're a Cuban independent journalist, you know you have the dictatorship's attention when the secret police summons you to headquarters to deliver an ominous message: If you keep reporting and writing your stories, you risk being sentenced to a long prison term. Considering there are some two dozen journalists in the Castro gulag, that is not an empty threat.
Journalist-blogger Luis Felipe Rojas, however, was unimpressed when the authorities recently tried to silence him into submission. In particular, what provoked their ire — and a warning that Rojas could be prosecuted under Cuba's notorious "gag law" — was his involvement with recent protests in Camagüey in support of Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, and writings on his blog considered to be "against the the prestige of the Cuban government."
"They told me think carefully, that I have a family, that I am a young person, an intellectual, that I could be writing without being detained," Rojas said.
"I told that in respect with that, I didn't have anything to talk about. My work as a journalist, I do independently of Cuban laws, just or unjust," he said.
Read Rojas' blog, Cruzar Las Alambradas ("Crossing the Barbed Wire"), in Spanish or in English.
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