Cuba authorities threaten journalists as law banning independent media goes into effect

A Cuban independent journalist who first reported on an anti-government protest was sent to prison and others have been pressured to stop their journalistic work as a new social-communication law banning independent media outlets went into effect Friday in Cuba.

Yeris Curbelo Aguilera, who reported on a protest in the eastern town of Caimanera for the independent news outlet Palenque Visión in May last year, was sentenced to two years in prison on Sept. 24.

In a video released ahead of the trial, Curbelo said he was assaulted by three men believed to work for Cuban state security on Father’s Day. Two of them had assaulted his son months earlier in April. But he was the one facing assault charges in a false case to punish him for his political activism and journalistic work, he said.

“How is it possible that they want to prosecute me now for the crime of [causing] minor injuries, when really those who have to be prosecuted, those who should be punished, are these repressors who brutally attacked my son and me?” he said. “It is unfair how the Cuban tyranny finds a way to treat cruelly those of us who peacefully fight for a free and democratic transition on our suffering island of Cuba.”

A Cuban court dismissed on Wednesday an appeal by five Cubans who protested in Caimanera and upheld sentences ranging between two and eight years under charges of “instigation to commit a crime,” “public disorder,” and “assault.” Video reports by Curbelo documented the protest and the crackdown that followed.

Since the islandwide demonstrations in July 2021, Cuban authorities have imprisoned hundreds of people who have participated in anti-government protests and prosecuted those who have reported or shared videos of the events online.

In April, Cuban authorities sentenced a young mother, Mayelín Rodríguez Prado, for participating in and sharing videos on Facebook of a protest in Nuevitas, a town in the central province of Camaguey.

Several new laws and decrees punish posting criticism of the government, communism or Cuban leaders online or in a media outlet. Starting Friday, all media outlets in the country must also seek formal government approval to continue working, according to a new Social Communication law. Foreign media outlets are doing so. But independent media outlets have been operating in a gray zone because there was no written legislation banning them, although their journalists have been frequently harassed, arrested or forced into exile.

The new Social Communication law was several years in the making and had been approved by the National Assembly in May 2023, but was only made official in June when it was published in the country’s Official Gazette.

The legislation is a mixed bag that agrees to long-term demands by journalists who work for state-controlled media, such as the authorization to air advertisements and the ability to obtain limited information from government officials, along with tighter restrictions that effectively make it illegal to work for an unauthorized media outlet or one receiving funds from sources seeking to “subvert the constitutional order” in the country.

Several independent media outlets, some based in Miami, like Cubanet and El Toque, have denounced renewed pressure from Cuban state security on their writers on the island to stop their journalistic work.

In an editorial Thursday, Cubanet said that several of its journalists on the island were threatened with long prison sentences or with repercussions for their relatives. In the editorial, Cubanet said state security officials seized personal belongings owned by the journalists.

In her account of the encounter with three state security officials last week, journalist María Lucía Expósito said she was accused of being a mercenary for collaborating with El Toque and other independent outlets. She said she was forced to give up money she was paid to attend a training workshop for journalists. She noted how the agents seemed well-fed and dressed, moving around in a motorcycle with government-paid phones and “interviewing” the accused journalists in air-conditioned houses where food was on display.

“Why do these houses used by members of state security have a generator, and not the primary schools I visited to offer photography courses?” she asked in a post published on Facebook questioning the government’s double standards about funding. “Why is an air conditioner necessary for an interrogation when there are no properly functioning air conditioners in many hospitals, like the one my sister works at in Pinar del Río?”

State security has targeted even media outlets that do not publish political stories or report on human-rights issues.

Earlier this month, the magazine A.M.P.M. announced “an indefinite pause in its activities” after more than six years of reporting on Cuba’s music scene due “to the increasing pressure and harassment” of Rafa Escalona, the magazine’s director, “by the Cuban counterintelligence agencies, which among other consequences, leaves us without the possibility of applying for funds to carry out our work and endangers the integrity of our project and the team involved.”

According to the website, the magazine had received support from the Norwegian embassy in Cuba and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation.

“The Cuban government continues to be nothing short of Draconian in its efforts to squash independent reporting on the island,” said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator with the Committee to Protect Journalists in Washington. “Cuban authorities must release journalist Yeris Curbelo Aguilera and should stop harassing Rafa Escalona.”