Interrogations, threats, arbitrary arrests, internet shutdowns and police repression were the price they paid for their criticism.
EFE (via 14ymedio), Havana, 5 April 2025 — Carolina, Yanelys, Luz, Anamelys, and Katia are just five names on the list of Cuban women forced into exile in recent years for their dissent, from mere criticism to political activism to independent journalism.
“I didn’t leave Cuba of my own free will, they sent me out,” says art historian and activist Carolina Barrero, who tells EFE that “the repression intensified throughout 2021,” following the ’27N’ demonstration on November 27 of the previous year in front of the Ministry of Culture demanding freedom of expression and work.
“The surveillance was constant: I lived under constant suspicion, in a state of constant harassment. They charged me with criminal offenses for exercising fundamental rights,” recalls Barrero, who now heads the NGO Ciudadanía y Libertad.
“The surveillance was constant: I lived under constant suspicion, in a state of constant harassment.”
She insists she suffered “systematic persecution by State Security,” intelligence, and domestic counterintelligence. “I was detained multiple times, subjected to prolonged house arrest without a court order, and threatened with imprisonment if I continued my work of reporting and organizing peaceful demonstrations,” she says.
In February 2022, she says, she received the “ultimatum”: “Leave the country or face criminal prosecution, with the explicit threat of extending reprisals to third parties such as mothers of political prisoners, fellow activists…”
Another woman, curator Yanelys Núñez tells EFE that the “institutional violence” against her began in 2016, when she was expelled from her job for creating the work The Museum of Dissidence in Cuba with the artist and dissident Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, currently in prison for insulting the symbols of the homeland, contempt, and public disorder.
The situation worsened two years later, due to the promotion of the dissident artist group the San Isidro Movement, explains Núñez from Madrid, where she arrived in 2019. She recalls “threats to family and friends, arbitrary arrests, police and telephone surveillance, the ban on cultural events,” as well as “physical, verbal, and psychological harassment and violence.”
“The experience of being politically persecuted simply for defending your right to exist, for defending human rights, is terrible,” laments Núñez, who currently coordinates the independent Observatory of Gender Alas Tensas.
“The motive for the persecution I suffered is that Cuba has been under a dictatorship for more than 60 years, and all defenders are criminalized.”
“The motive for the persecution I suffered is that Cuba has been under a dictatorship for more than 60 years, and all defenders are criminalized,” says Núñez, adding: “I am not the first to have suffered this political violence in the country for wanting to participate in public and political life.”
Journalist Luz Escobar decided to work outside the official media. Because she worked at 14ymedio, “State Security put all the pressure they could on me to leave journalism in Cuba. But when they implicated my daughters in the repressive scheme, I decided to go into exile,” she told EFE.
“At first, they summoned me to the police, where they interrogated me to stop working. They insisted, but when I told them no, they changed their tactics and the tone of their threats: ’You’re doing things wrong, and if you continue, you’ll go to jail.’ All because reporting is a crime in Cuba,” she explains.
“After November 27th (27N), they saw me as an activist, and the repression multiplied: interrogations, threats, arbitrary arrests, internet shutdowns—all of this happened weekly,” she says. Escobar, whose father is also a freelance journalist, adds that even the day she was at the airport about to leave for Spain, she was warned that she couldn’t return frequently, only if it was “very urgent.”
“I spent weeks without being able to leave the house because security and the police were always downstairs trying to arrest me.”
Curator Anamelys Ramos, a member of the San Isidro Movement, did not leave Cuba due to pressure, although she admits she was “under brutal harassment.” “I spent weeks without being able to leave the house because security and the police were always downstairs trying to arrest me,” she told EFE.
After the Island-wide July 11 protests, the largest anti-government demonstrations in decades, she left for Mexico to study for a doctorate in Anthropology. In February 2022, when she tried to return, the “biggest outrage” occurred. “They wouldn’t even let me board the American Airlines plane because Cuba sent a notification to the airline that I wouldn’t be admitted into the country. By not letting me return, I was left in legal limbo and without a home or job,” she laments.
“I’ve always been in the spotlight of State Security,” communicator Katia Sánchez tells EFE. More than five years ago, she created La Penúltima Casa, the country’s first digital communication blog to help people use online platforms professionally.
She then created the El Pitch podcast, for entrepreneurs, in a country where the communications sector is restricted for the self-employed. As the project grew, so did the harassment from State Security, she laments. At first, it was “friendly,” with questions about her contacts and sources of funding, but it ended with “interrogations and threats that led to the closure of the project in Cuba.”
This communicator spent years “looking for loopholes to break through” to keep her project going, but “all of that ends up being bigger than starting a business.” Moving to the United States was the solution she found to keep her project afloat.
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