A journalism student at the University of Havana has been expelled for two years after he started "controversial" group on Facebook, according to a report posted at Diario de Cuba.
According to the Web site's sources, Darío Alejandro Paulino Escobar was disciplined because he reported on a meeting of the Union of Young Communists that "should not have been disclosed."
With journalistic principles like that, Paulino will never get a job with one of the dictatorship's official propaganda organs!
But other sources said the expulsion had nothing to do with his journalism. Intead, Paulino was punished in response to the supposed controversy sparked by the Facebook group — "the Communications Faculty at the University of Havana" — where members have engaged in "heated debates" about freedom of speech and of the press, efforts by the Castro dictatorship to stifle bloggers and other topics.
Freedom of expression is outlawed in Cuba and so, too, apparently is academic freedom. Paulino was at least the third university student punished in recent weeks for breaking with communist system. Sayli Navarro, the daughter of political prisoner Felix Navarro, was expelled from the University of Matanzas for studying to be an independent journalist; and Martha Bravo Perez was expelled from the Central University of Las Villas for quitting the local communist youth group.
As more young Cubans choose to "un-friend" the communist system, there are likely to be more expulsions.
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