UPDATED: Cuban student denies to have been arrested and slams foreign media for their “manipulation”

On Tuesday, Eliécer Ávila Sicilia, a student of Havana’s University of Information Sciences (UCI) who was shown in a video footage questioning Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the Cuban parliament, denied having been arrested as some foreign and anti-Castro media reported (see below). In two videos published at Cuban government-supportive CubaDebate, Ávila claims there was no arrest. He added, according to Cuban agency Prensa Latina:

The things that need to be changed or revised will be made within the Revolution, stated the young student, whom foreign press assert is a prisoner of Cuban justice for expressing his viewpoints.

Regarding that, Ávila indicated he has a normal life at UCI, and his family is completely calm.

He said he found out how efficiently and rapidly the machinery of the media acted against the island by distorting his statements to link them with other issues.

"One feels powerless, wanting to explain to the whole world that the international media is saying a complete lie, twisting the meaning of our opinions," he added.

Associated Press adds:

Avila said he went home to be with his family while he had his wisdom teeth pulled, and fellow student leaders from a satellite campus of his university gave him a ride back to the capital — about 700 kilometers (430 miles) away — so he could deal with the aftermath of the international airing of the tape.

The CubaDebate website states that the "manipulation" started with a report by Radio Martí, a network of US-propaganda outlets aimed to Cubans, which was later deleted from their website. It quotes through screen captures from the foreign media websites who echoed the Radio Martí report, and ends the posting by saying: "Cubans are truly helpless and unprotected, but from the Western media and their lies".

Meanwhile, the UCI website features a statement from its "students, professors, and workers to the direction of the Cuban Revolution" where they claim "have been subject to the most rude and ill-intentioned manipulation by the imperialism main media outlets and its footmen", and express their support for the Revolution.

The Miami Herald quotes Mauricio Claver-Carone, heads of the Washington office of the U.S.-Cuba Democracy Political Action Committee, "which lobbies Congress to keep Cuban sanctions in place", as saying: "In typical dictatorial fashion, the student… appeared on Cuban-state TV last night and said he was not arrested, but rather, given a four-day ride back to school. Obviously, the heavy hand of the regime organized a damage-control operation, and Avila was coached and scripted, and his family threatened, if he didn’t participate."

[Updated 12.02.2008 17:05 COT]

Our original article

Last week, the BBC obtained (sorry, no English link so far) from an anonymous source a footage of an event held at Havana’s University of Information Sciences (UCI) where students’ representatives make some tough questions to Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the Cuban parliament. One of them, 21 year-old Eliécer Ávila Sicilia, was arrested on Saturday morning at his home in Las Tunas province, eastern Cuba.

Why? He just asked some true, tough questions about the political and economic system in his country. According to this CNN report:

"It seems to us a revolution cannot advance without a plan," Eliécer Ávila said, standing at a microphone. "I’m sure it exists, we just want to know what it is."

He asked about restrictions to Internet access and why workers are paid in Cuban pesos but have to buy many basic goods in another currency that is 25 times as expensive — the "convertible peso" that foreign tourists are required to use.

"That means a worker has to work two or three days to buy a toothbrush," he said.

They also asked why they could not travel abroad (Ávila, who is a Che Guevara fan, yearns of going to the place where the Argentinian revolutionary was killed by the Bolivian army) or, as Alejandro Hernández, the first student who appears on the video above, why they were voting for people they didn’t even know or that never bothered to visit their provinces or their colleges.

What did Alarcón said? To the travel aboard thing, he said that from the more than 6 billion people on Earth, "very few" could travel and that if everyone could, there would be an "air traffic jam". On why they couldn’t go to the hotels the foreigners lodge in, he responded that he could not do either because the ones who do "have the money". He admitted to be "ignorant" on the internet access thing and that the political system is being discussed by the government.

According to this report, one of the agents who arrested Ávila told his grandmother not to worry because he will appear in Cubavisión’s Mesa redonda, a prime time news and current issues show. The same report says the woman fears his grandson would be forced to retract from what he said at the UCI event.

Though there may be some reasons out of Cuba’s regime reach causing its internet access is so limited, Cuba still cannot be considered a full "democracy", even if they have "elections". Maybe what happens to Mr Ávila can tell us if things are going to change, at least a little…