Tonight, at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Committee to Protect Journalists will honor the recipients of the 2003 International Press Freedom Awards. One, Cuban Manuel Vázquez Portal, who helped establish the independent news agency Grupo de Trabajo Decoro, will be honored in absentia. He is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence in communist Cuba on spurious charges. He was arrested as part of a three-day crackdown on journalists that Castro initiated while the world’s attention was focused on the war in Iraq; in all, 28 journalists were arrested, convicted, and given prison sentences ranging from 14 and 27 years. As a representative said last week, when the recipients of this year’s awards were named, “There does not appear to be any particular reason why the regime targeted this journalist, except that his reporting and well written, often lyrical, opinion columns have been consistently critical of the regime.”

According to the CPJ, Mr. Vázquez Portal, a writer and a poet, was born in the city of Morón, in the central province of Ciego de Ávila, in 1951. After a career as a high school teacher, a literary adviser to Cuba’s Ministry of Culture, and a journalist for several state-owned press outlets, Mr. Vázquez Portal began working for the independent news agency Cuba Press in 1995. In September 1998, Mr. Vázquez Portal helped establish the independent news agency Grupo de Trabajo Decoro. He worked there, writing mostly opinion pieces, until his arrest in March 2003. His pieces, according to the CPJ, offered “insightful criticisms of the Cuban electoral system, as well as commentary about the disillusion of many Cubans during the 12-year economic and social crisis that has rocked their country.”

Mr. Vázquez Portal has written articles and a diary in prison. His wife smuggled his personal diary out of prison. In June 2003, excerpts from his journal were printed in several publications outside of Cuba. His writings have also appeared at www.cubanet.org, a Miami-based Web site dedicated to independent Cuban journalism. “I have thought about the reprisals when these pages are published,” Mr. Vázquez Portal wrote. “I am prepared. If for the simple act of working as a journalist I was given an 18-year prison sentence, nothing else can be more unjust or excessive.” As he is honored tonight, Mr. Vázquez Portal’s plight is one for politicians such as Senator Clinton to consider as they push to lift the ban on American travel to Cuba, and for the communist sympathizers to consider as they violate that same ban to spend dollars in Castro’s Cuba.