Interviews with Jose Luis Garcia Paneque

If we think back, the first waves of political suppression were to send people to jail, execute them and notify their families. Only a few groups of people knew. Some people sent notes or letters that someone took outside of the country. Many years went by and many of these people lost their lives.

But then the 90’s came. During this decade lots of information was transmitted through telephone conversations. Now there was another possibility. It was still difficult. You had to move from one phone to the other to be able to transmit a note written in a notebook with a pen, and then you started to lie over the phone. If a phone was compromised, you changed phones over and over. New difficulties arise again.

Years went by and another chapter started; the Internet age. Blogs were created, which are a form of independent journalism, and then we have more media. Cellular phones start appearing in Cuba, although they are very costly to an average citizen in Cuba, but some of us who work with the opposition, with help from the exterior, are able to access them. This becomes a problem for the regime. It is very real. Electronic media is still very limited within Cuba. So the same problem persists, the majority of the information goes outside of Cuba but it is not transmitted within the island. All the information is transmitted through the regime. The regime interferes with all transmissions coming from the south of Florida and so the citizens cannot access television via satellite, because the government does not allow these media within the island. A friend in the USA, Alan Gross [Alan Gross is an American development expert who was working under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development with the Jewish community in Cuba. In 2009, he was arrested as a spy and given a 15-year sentence for crimes against the Cuban state] is trying to take information to a religious group in Cuba using this equipment. The regime knows that this equipment really is not under its control or in its hands. It knows that if Cuban people starts to be informed, this will become a potential danger for them. Today, at this moment in Cuba, although demonstrations are repressed by the regime, there are some that are recorded by a camera or a cellular phone, and these images are going to the exterior. These images are creating opinions and the Cuban regime, even if the opposite is believed, is really isolated in the democratic world.

It still has support from some countries like Venezuela and Bolivia. But even these countries, due to their economic deterioration and economic crisis, cannot help Cuba anymore like they did 4 or 5 years ago. Therefore, everything that is taking place within Cuba is becoming harder for the regime.

José Luis García Paneque was born in 1965 in Cuba. He studied medicine at the Institute of Medical Sciences of Camaguey. As a doctor, he specialized in plastic surgery.

In 1998, he became active as a dissident, joining the Freedom Press Agency, an alternative journalism project. In 2000, he became the initiative’s director. For his activism, he was removed from his position at the hospital where he worked.

In March 2003, Dr. García was among the 75 dissidents who were arrested in the crackdown known as the Black Spring. He was summarily sentenced to 24 years in prison. He was imprisoned for seven years and four months, two years of which were in solitary confinement. The harsh conditions in prison caused him to lose half of his body weight, posing life-threatening consequences to his health. In 2010, he was released in negotiations brokered by the Roman Catholic Church. As a condition of his release, Dr. García was required to leave Cuba.

Since leaving his homeland, Dr. García has overseen the Freedom Observatory project, which is associated with the Institute of Strategic and International Studies at the Catholic University of Valencia in Spain. He currently lives in Florida.

Follow Dr. García’s blog at http://vocesdeldestierro.wordpress.com/.