Calixto Martínez Arias
Cuban independent journalist Calixto Martínez Arias, who has been in jail since May 25 when he was arrested while covering an opposition protest, started a hunger strike this week after officials moved him to a punishment cell, according to Roberto Jésus Guerra Pérez, his editor at the CIHPRESS news agency.
Martínez, who had been released from jail May 14 after three weeks in custody, started his protest to demand that the government halt the deportation from Havana of Cubans without official permission to be in the capital.
(Remember, Cuba is ruled by a murdering, thieving, lying dictatorship that reserves for itself the right to determine where Cubans can live or visit within their own country.)
Martínez is being held at a Havana prison set up recently to process Cubans found to be illegally in Havana before they are deported back to their home provinces. Many of those deported originally were from Oriente in eastern Cuba.
Officials have previously deported Martínez from the capital on four occasions, according to Guerra's report, which is based in part on an interview with another detainee at the "Alternative Center for Detainee Processing."
When officials denied Martínez's demands that officials halt the deportations and that they restore his cell phone service, they told he didn't have the right to make such demands and then moved him to a punishment cell.
That's when Martínez started his hunger strike, according to Walter Miguel Lahens Rodríguez, a bicycle taxi driver accused of being a "pre-criminal social danger."
Reporters Without Borders has more on the Martínez case.
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