Artist activist group 27N has submitted a legal movement for the dismissal of Minister of Society Alpidio Alonso, who on January 27 was just one of a quantity of governing administration officials who physically confronted a team of tranquil protesters demonstrating in aid of totally free speech. Alonso can be seen in a video aggressively knocking a cell cell phone out of the hand of Mauricio Mendoza, a reporter for the newspaper Diario de Cuba, all through the protest, which took location outdoors the ministry developing in Havana and was meant to mark the two-thirty day period anniversary of a protest from the passage of Decree 349, which involves artists to submit their get the job done to a government overview course of action ahead of being authorized to launch or complete it publicly.
Citing a regulation according to which a community formal engaged in behavior unbecoming to his or her business office may perhaps be stripped of electrical power, artist 27N representatives Solveig Font and Carolina Barrero lodged the February 3 filing on behalf of far more than 1,200 artists and activists who signed a petition demanding Alonso’s ouster. Between the signatories were artists Tania Bruguera, Sandra Ceballos, and Tomás Sánchez as effectively as journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez and artwork historian Rafael Rojas Bruguera was threatened by point out security agents next the November protest, and Álvarez, who was masking situations surrounding it, was attacked in the area media.
Also menacing demonstrators at the protest ended up vice ministers of tradition Fernando Rojas and Fernando León Jacomino, whose resignation, together with that of Alonso and president Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, is known as for in a independent petition.
Pursuing Alonso’s aggression versus Mendoza, which is alleged to have followed the tranquil demonstrators’ ask for that armed guards depart the area, Mendoza and a variety of artists were reportedly compelled aboard buses and detained. On February 4, the day after filing the movement to take out Alonso, Barrero was said to have been detained by police although on the cellphone with Bruguera, who herself was taken into custody by police on December 4, interrogated, and put on dwelling arrest.
“As citizens of the Republic of Cuba we think in the correct to peacefully assert our rights and we emphatically condemn any manifestation of violence, in distinct any manifestation of state violence promoted by establishments and exercised by community officers,” stated 27N in a statement. “A public servant cannot use of violence to restrict citizens’ rights with impunity.”