Miami, July 21—The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calls on the Cuban government to end its harassment of journalist Austin Llerandi of Amanecer Habanero, a non-state media newsletter.
Llerandi told CPJ that state security agents came looking for him at his father’s house on July 13 in Havana, demonstrating invasive knowledge of his personal life and his wife’s high-risk pregnancy. During a subsequent two-hour interrogation at the Marianao police station the next day, Llerandi, 36, said officers brandished a thick file with his name on it and alleged he had committed crimes against state security. According to Llerandi, the agents demanded that he cease distributing news or face imprisonment.
“Journalist Austin Llerandi’s harassment by state security agents reflects Cuba’s continued campaign to intimidate journalists and suppress critical reporting,” said Jose Zamora, CPJ’s regional director for the Américas. “Authorities must end these threats and allow journalists to do their work without fear of reprisal or imprisonment.”
Llerandi said the interrogation did not appear to be related to any specific article published in Amanecer Habanero but rather directed at the newsletter’s overall content, which covers life in Cuba amid declining state infrastructure and repression of dissent.
Amanecer Habanero is one of several media outlets belonging to the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP), a Cuban exile media group which has received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a non-profit foundation that manages U.S. government-funded democracy and press freedom programs around the world. ICLEP has been publishing newsletters since 2012.
Cuba’s penal code considers it a crime to defy “socialist law” or work as a journalist outside of state-controlled media. These laws violate the Cuban constitution which recognizes freedom of press as well as freedom of thought and expression, while also establishing the people’s “right to the free development of their personality.”