Abraham Jimenez Enoa: “Forced Exile Stamped Out All My Joy”
By Julio Antonio Fernandez Destrada (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Cuban journalist Abraham Jimenez Enoa has felt in his own flesh the contradictions of his country and of exile. Co-founder of the online magazine El Estornudo, and author of La isla oculta [“The hidden island”] and Aterrizar en el mundo, [“To land in the world”], his career has been marked by the honesty with which he chronicles everyday Cuban life, but also by the persecution that led him to abandon Cuba in 2022. Since that time, he’s been living in Barcelona, where he writes about loneliness, identity, and the wounds that totalitarianism leaves.
In your book, Aterrizar en el mundo, you speak of your early years, and how you came to journalism almost by accident. You didn’t hail from a family with ties to that world, yet you found your calling there. How did that happen?
Abraham Jimenez Enoa: Yes, it’s all related to chance. There aren’t any journalists in my family; the majority are military, workers or lawyers. However, there’s always been an attraction to sports, and from there came my passion. As a child, I wanted to be an athlete, a baseball player, but I didn’t have the talent. So I thought: “If I can’t play, I can be the one broadcasting the games.” I spent my time on the sofa in my house, narrating the baseball or football games. When the moment came to determine my future, I knew that to become a sportscaster, I had to study journalism. So I entered the career, without feeling a vocation for writing, and with no idea of what awaited me.
Once in the profession, I discovered I was no good as a sportscaster. Speaking in front of the cameras scared me, my diction was poor, I didn’t have the right voice for it. But I was already in deep, and in my second or third year, I began to read authors from the new North American journalism, and their Latin American counterparts. I discovered you could write journalism as if it were literature. That fascinated me. I began to read compulsively, and to write, as a self-assigned exercise. It was all self-taught, without workshops or formal preparation.
And the political topics? What made you pivot towards these?
AJE: Once again by chance. I graduated and began writing sports chronicles. But. above all, I was interested in the Cuban athletes who had emigrated and been forgotten. I began to tell their stories and following that thread I entered into social and political topics. Afterwards, together with friends from the university, we founded El Estornudo, a magazine of narrative journalism. We broadened the spectrum there: social topics, daily life, some difficult themes. I began to write about Cuban reality from a more critical lens.
How did your family react to this turn towards independent journalism?
AJE: At first, they didn’t take it seriously. They thought I was “playing around” or something like that. When I told them I was working with a digital magazine, they didn’t understand what that was. In 2016, El Estornudo was a rarity. But everything changed when the calls from State Security began, the interrogations and the harassment, even against them. Up until that moment, they didn’t have any idea what exercising independent journalism in Cuba meant: it was a very distant world to them.
How do you maintain your political convictions in an atmosphere of fear and persecution? Did you ever think you had made the wrong decision?
AJE: I never looked at it like that. Since I began writing about the real Cuba, I did it out of professional conviction, not heroism. I don’t swallow that rhetoric about the “brave Cuban” or the “bronze Titan.” I’ve been afraid; I’ve been in bad shape; I’ve written about this. I believe that showing vulnerability is the most significant aspect of getting people to understand what the monster of totalitarianism is, and what it’s capable of.
I never thought about quitting. I accepted the personal consequences – the abductions, the interrogations – but the hardest part was when my family began to suffer: they fired my mother, forced my father to retire, my sister begged me to stop. Those were the most difficult blows.
You left Cuba in 2022. What was that process of leaving your life behind and beginning all over again like?
AJE: It was like dying and being born again. That Abraham who lived in Cuba doesn’t exist anymore. I’d never left the country, and suddenly there I was in Europe, 33 years old, without family, without a support network. Everything was different – the capitalism, the racism, the loneliness. I hit bottom. I suffered an identity crisis, depression. I felt I was a ghost, disappearing a little more each day. One night, after leaving my partner and my son at the airport, I returned home alone on a bus. I looked out the window and wondered: “What am I doing here, with all of my loved ones an ocean away?” That’s when I understood what exile really is.
Exile brings an expectation of joy, of freedom. But you speak of pain, of loss. How do you manage it?
AJE: It’s difficult, because you don’t want to appear ungrateful. You’re safe, but you’ve left your entire life behind. I’ve had to raise my son far from everything I knew. I’m not going to write an ode to sorrow, but I’m also not going to pretend that this is a fiesta. It’s not. They’ve stamped out all my joy. My happiness muscle has atrophied.
As a Cuban that defines themself as progressive, do you feel you face a double discrimination?
AJE: I believe there’s a lack of understanding in the political conversation regarding Cuba: understanding of the other; accepting that it doesn’t matter if you’re a rightist, a leftist, or whatever. But when you declare yourself as having a more progressive vision, there’s a frontal attack. They can’t understand how, coming from Cuba and having suffered so much, you can continue defending certain values of the left. I think that behind this is the idea that if you criticize the regime, you can’t be a leftist.
I recall a concrete episode with the Spanish left. A short time after I arrived, I was invited to some talks in Santiago de Compostela, organized by the online Spanish newspaper El Diario. Later, the Spanish political scientist and writer, [Juan Carlos] Monedero appeared, and someone remarked that I was an exiled Cuban journalist. All of a sudden, he began to yell at me: “Trump-lover!” “Yankee!” and they had to shepherd him away.
That anecdote summarizes very well what it means in my case, to be a Cuban, exiled, a journalist and a leftist. The left here doesn’t accept you, because they consider you a “yankee;” and the right sees you as a communist. It’s as if everyone needs to put a tag on you: “You’re this.” But no, I’m none of that. I’m Abraham Jimenez, and sometimes even I don’t know for sure who I am.
I don’t see a promising political future in Cuba if the options continue being the same. The country needs pluralism, inclusion, and respect for rights. Nonetheless, we Cubans outside reproduce the same totalitarian logic: intolerance, the need for a strongman, the division into bands. The totalitarianism has remained inside of us, like a cultural and emotional reflex. We’re better prepared for intolerance than for liberty. We’ve exported our wounds, prejudices and dogmas.
AJE: I’m also very pessimistic when this kind of conversation arises, or when someone asks me about Cuba’s future. I’m not clear about it. If there’s one thing I am clear about, though, it’s that we’re a nation that’s been destroyed and it will be very difficult to raise up the foundations again, in order to construct something beautiful and hopeful. I believe we remain profoundly wounded.
Abraham, thanks for this conversation. I hope we can continue talking and accompanying each other in this city, in these very complex times.
AJE: Thanks to all of you. It’s been a pleasure.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.