I Fled Cuba’s Media Repression to Remain Being a Journalist
By The Committee to Protect Journalists
HAVANA TIMES – Cuban journalist Jose Luis Tan Estrada boarded a plane in Havana last December because he thought exile was the only way to continue his career and protect his family. It was his first time on an airplane.
Tan Estrada, 28, had faced escalating repression by Cuban authorities for months. After he was fired from teaching journalism at the University of Camagüey in 2022 over his criticism of the regime, he became a freelance reporter for Cuban outlets overseas including YucaByte, CubaNet, and Diario de Cuba. Last April, he was briefly detained and fined for his journalism; then, in December, he was summoned to report to a police station.
At the time, his entire family was under scrutiny for his work; he said that police patrolled the streets around his house in Camagüey. Rather than report for the summons, he made the difficult decision to flee, joining other Cuban journalists who have left the country in the wake of the October passage of a repressive Social Communication Law banning anti-government speech and requiring non-state media to seek government approval.
CPJ spoke by phone with Tan Estrada from Guyana, where he is living with the help of friends and relatives while he figures out his options, including seeking a visa to visit the United States. He spoke about the new law, just the latest clampdown in one of the hemisphere’s most restrictive countries for the press, what fuels his passion for the profession, and how he plans to continue covering Cuba from abroad.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What motivated you to become a journalist in a country where state control of the media has existed for so long?
Ever since I was a child, I always wanted to be a journalist. In 12th grade I took a very rigorous “journalism attitude test.” To study journalism in Cuba you have to pass this test. It covers general culture, Spanish, grammar, and writing. I passed and so was able to enter the profession and eventually become a professor. My motivation was always wanting to help people, to give them solutions to their problems, and to tell interesting life stories of people who really needed to be heard. I wanted to be that voice of information, that voice of oxygen for everyone with situations that need to be solved.
Were you able to teach the profession in an objective way, or are you obliged to teach the Cuban government’s understanding of what it means to be a journalist at the service of the state?
The University of Camagüey is an old institution and very indoctrinated by the regime. If you really want to teach your students to be good journalists, you have to depart from those norms. I tried to teach in an objective way, based on facts, on standard international norms of how to do journalism professionally, letting the students be free to choose what was the real news, rather than impose the truth on them. In the official state media, what the Cuban Communist party says is the focus of the news, even when that is not the important part of the news, but because the party orders it to be. That’s not real journalism.
I used to teach my students to put everything on a scale: you can choose the journalism that really reflects the real problems of ordinary Cubans, or you can simply to be another propagandist of the communist regime in Cuba.
In October, Cuba implemented a new Social Communication Law restricting reporting for domestic and foreign media outlets. How has this affected freedom of expression in Cuba?
I am an example of how the regime uses repression through this law of Social Communication.
In all the interrogations with a state security agent named “Cristian” in Camagüey, he threatened me that if I violated the communication law or was planning to violate it, I was going to be imprisoned.
We have cases in Cuba of political prisoners who are currently serving sentences of four to six years of imprisonment for simply posting on their Facebook wall or complaining about the situation of the blackouts and the untenable situation that ordinary Cubans are living in Cuba.
The communication law is nothing more than an attempt to silence, to put an end to the independent press in Cuba, because in the last few years independent Cuban journalism has played a fundamental role in the struggle to overthrow the Cuban communist regime.
Now most people do not go to the official media to consult if news is true or false. They go to independent journalists, like me, and the social media networks we use to communicate. This worries the regime because the independent journalists are doing a real job using fact-based objectivity to show the reality as it is, and we show the world how in Cuba the human rights of the population are constantly violated and how the Cuban regime is, little by little, destroying the population and plunging it into total chaos, hopelessness, hunger, and repression.
The law clearly states that news agencies, radio, television, and print and digital social media are a socialist priority and cannot belong to anyone else, that is to say, they belong to the Communist regime. They made it clear that everything that is outside that law, everything they have no control over, they consider illegal.
We are talking about a society where there is no right to public information on the part of the citizens, where access to information is restricted, where they prohibit and block access to independent [non-government] media. In Cuba, in order to access most of the independent media you need to create a VPN [a virtual private network that shields your IP address and geographical location].
Why did you decide to leave Cuba in the end?
The reason that made me leave Cuba was the brutal repression by state security against me for doing independent journalism.
In the last few weeks, the repression increased so much that it was not only against me, but also against my mother and my little brother, my closest, most beloved family who I lived with in Cuba. My life and my freedom were in danger. Police patrols were watching my house permanently, my phone internet was cut, and they tried to turn the neighbors against me. They didn’t succeed because the neighbors knew the kind of person I am.
A few weeks before all this, a student at the University of Camagüey, a person I trust very much, overheard a conversation between state security people at the university where an agent told another professor that they were going to make sure that when the year ended, I was going to be in prison. So, I knew they were going to get me, two plus two equals four.
My mother got worried that my freedom was in danger. Even at Havana Airport the Cuban state security were waiting for me. They put me in a room and strip-searched me. The immigration authorities blackmailed me, threatened me, and told me that if I returned to Cuba there would be major consequences [for my family].
I ended up in Guyana because Cuban state security made sure that the Nicaraguan regime of Daniel Ortega denied me entry. I wanted to go to Nicaragua and from there to the United States. Instead, I had to come to Guyana where I am stranded right now.
Now that you are in exile, how do you plan to proceed? Are you hoping to come to the United States? If so, do you plan to continue working as a journalist or is it too early to look that far into the future?
I have always said that the state security, the Cuban communist regime, will not silence me. I am going to continue doing independent journalism. I will continue to advocate for the freedom of the more than 1,000 political prisoners in Cuba. [In January, Cuba began releasing 553 prisoners under an agreement with the Vatican.] I will continue to be the pen of those people who need their life stories to be told, to denounce the regime, through my journalism, through my activism on social networks for the freedom of Cuba. My voice, my pen, will always be on the side of the ordinary Cuban who is struggling to free himself once and for all from that regime that for more than 60 years has brought so much terror and suffering.