Cuban Citizens Blocked from Travel Abroad
HAVANA TIMES – The ban on leaving the country is used continuously at the convenience of the Cuban government to prevent someone who thinks differently from the official discourse from traveling abroad.
This time it was the turn of Ileana Alvarez, director of the feminist magazine Alas Tensas and Pedro Manuel Gonzalez Reinoso, of CubaNet, a site censored on the island.
Today April 6th, after checking in for their flight, they were both informed that they could not travel. They were heading to Panama to attend a seminar on gender journalism.
In recent days the departure of activists Adonis Milian, Gorki Avila and Berta Soler was also blocked.
Everything seems to indicate that the government fears the participation of dissidents, activists and independent journalists at the Summit of the Americas and collateral events to be held next week in Lima, Peru, where the government of Raul Castro will try to demonstrate the unity of the Cuban people around his government and the Communist Party, two weeks before the appointment of a new president of the country.
Medea Benjamin, Code Pink,
Has said that living in Castro’s Cuba made her feel “like [she] died and went to heaven.”
The Communist government is getting more irrelevant in the eyes of the Cuban people; they can’t wait for the last of the Castro brothers to drop dead. Hearing the same tune for the last 59 years is getting boring. People want new challenges in life!
I think it is something like keeping a lid on it by the Cuban Government, if nobody turns up from Cuba to object against what is taking place in Cuba then people start to believe that all is well in Cuba! How is such a repressive government still able to manipulate and hold back the Cuban people? or does a large part of the population still believe in the government?
What is the Castro dictatorship so afraid of?