They are called Abraham, Luz or Alejandro. They participated in the creation of the first online information sites in Cuba when the Internet developed on the island less than ten years ago. In recent months, the latest independent journalists who still resisted the harassment of the regime have almost all taken the way to exile.
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On the scene installed in the vast cloister of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Cuban journalist Luz Escobar, of the independent information site 14ymedio, is struggling to hide her emotion. “I come from a country where the word” journalist “is synonymous with” enemy “and where the national media operate as propaganda organs of the only authorized party [the Communist Party of Cuba, PCC]”, she. This Wednesday, October 19, she received the International Journalism Prize awarded by the Spanish daily El Mundo, at the same time as Russian journalist Alexei Kovalev. It describes the way in which the Cuban regime “has carried out systematic work of destruction of the journalistic profession” and how itself suffered “arbitrary arrests, constant threats, intense campaigns of destruction of [its] reputation and frequent Police inclusion around [it] to [] prevent it from going out “.
Luz Escobar is the daughter of journalist Reinaldo Escobar, expelled from the profession in 1988 after a report on the frustrations of the Cuban youth and co -founder of 14ymedio with his wife, the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. Arriving in Madrid on October 17, she is the last of a long list of journalists to have won Spain or the United States in recent months, in a context of exodus. More than 220,000 Cubans have indeed crossed the border of the United States between October 2021 and September 2022, according to official figures from the United States border protection department. And an indefinite number fled in Latin America or Europe misery, food shortages and drugs and increased repression. This movement is unprecedented.
“In recent years, many colleagues have left to escape the harassment of the regime. With the last reform of the penal code, the threats have increased. I am undoubtedly among the last journalists who remained in Cuba,” said -St, Friday, October 21, in a café in the center of Madrid, at the foot of the pension where she settled with her husband and two daughters, time to find a place to start a new life.
exile or prison
In January 2022, the former director and co -founder of the online review El Astorno and regular columnist in the Washington Post, Abraham Jiménez Enoa, 33, landed in Barcelona. He had received an ultimatum from state security services: exile or prison. “It has never been easy to do journalism in Cuba because, according to the Constitution, it is an activity subject to the CCP and all those who exercise it out of this framework are considered illegal, explains the journalist to the world , which has just obtained the International Press Freedom Prize, awarded by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ), installed in the United States. From our beginnings, in 2015, I was submitted to assignments By house, to numerous interrogations, to the confiscation of my equipment. But, with the social boiling of recent years, the repression has grown further. Almost all my colleagues have left before me. “
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