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The Audio Long Read
I launched Cuba’s first independent magazine. And that’s when my troubles began
00:42:20
My friends and I wanted to tell the story of Cuban life, without interference. Before long, I was being isolated, monitored and interrogated By Abraham Jiménez Enoa. Read by Sebastián Capitán Viveros A version of this essay was previously published in the Dial under the title The Sneeze. Translation by Lily Meyer
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- [00:00]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
This is the Guardian.
- [00:09]
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- [01:15]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
This article contains some swearing and scenes that some listeners may find distressing. Take care when listening.
- [01:23]
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Welcome to the Guardian Long Read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our longreads, go to theguardian.com longread.
- [01:39]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
I launched Cuba's first independent magazine, and that's when my troubles began. By Abraham Jimenez Enoa Read by Sebastian Capitan Viveros A version of this essay was previously published in the Dial under the title the Sneeze. One day in the middle of 2014, my friend Carlos Manuel Alvarez asked me to join him on the newsroom's balcony. Wind gusted in our eyes. Elbows on the railing, we stared at the sea as we talked. We were killing time because neither of us had a computer to work on. All of them were in use at On Cuba, the magazine in Havana where we worked. Only editors got their own computers. The rest of us had to share, which sometimes meant waiting an hour. Several of my university friends and I had lucked into contributing roles at On Cuba, and even though we weren't on staff, we were always in the newsroom. It was a way to keep our group together. Sometimes, over beers, we dreamed aloud about a newsroom couple we wanted to topple. Ugo Cancio, the publisher and turn his resources, a giant office with multiple rooms and a balcony with sea views, computers and Internet money connections into the media outlet. We wanted something with our imprint. We agreed that our primary mandate would be investigative journalism. We'd give up breaking news. Instead, we dig, analyze, identify, reconstruct, reveal, and above all, narrate. Storytelling would be our baseline and our distinctive trait, our flag and our seal. And it would be our kind of storytelling. We thought reporting without depth was pointless. Our country's history is dying because nobody's telling it, we'd say. Our second mandate emerged from the first. We'd write features. We read, dissected and envied every single piece in the main Latin American magazines of the Malpensante, Gatopardo, Etiqueta Negra, Soho and Fibia. We were sure that rigorous long form journalism work, that mixed reportage, essay and criticism could untangle the knots of contemporary Cuban life every night. The dream ended when we got into bed and remembered the reality waiting for us in the morning. In order to carry out the social service required of us after graduation, Carla Colome worked at the state theater magazine Tablas. Jorge Carrasco at the website of Radio Reloc, a station that broadcast the time. Michael Gonzalez at Granma, the newspaper of the Communist Party and Cuba's main outlet, again online. Carlos Manuel Alvarez at the Ministry of Culture's communications office while I worked at the Ministry of the Interior on Cuba gave us a chance to express ourselves. But as it changed, we became obsolete. We criticized Cuban reality, which no longer suited the publisher who wanted to maintain an office in Havana. We started to clash with our editors. I covered sport, and one day I was informed that if I wanted to continue to do so, I had to concentrate on teams and athletes in Cuba, not abroad. Why? I said. We want to concentrate on the players who are still here, I was told. They are the ones who matter. The explanation stank of the government. I decided to stop going into the office unless it was strictly necessary. I left on Cuba only a few weeks after my conversation with Carlos Manuel on the balcony. He'd just returned from Colombia, where he'd attended a journalism workshop at the Fundacion Gabo. He'd never left Cuba before, along with another friend who drove us in his father's car. I'd accompanied him to the airport for his early morning flight. Carlos Manuel came home with a virus. At the Fundacion Gabo, he'd caught the idea that there's no such thing as a good time and place to be a journalist. He got it by listening to writers from across Latin America describe working under conditions at least as adverse as ours. People drawn to the profession because they wanted to be the custodians of truth in their countries. The region's turmoil was producing a new generation of independent media. New outlets, such as Brazil's Agencia Publica, Venezuela's Effecto Cocuyo and Mexico's Periodistas de Hapie, were pioneering an untraditional way of reporting. They didn't relay the news coolly without getting their hands dirty. They judged the powerful, held them accountable, sank their teeth, stylishly, of course, into flesh. They abandoned tact, and with it the fallacy the journalism must be objective. They were out to defend human rights, and if they could do it, so could we. Without a free press, Cuba's history and memory were at the mercy of power. Living there as a journalist was like being a zombie who knows he's dead. I ruminated constantly on one if, in the future, somebody tried to reconstruct early 21st century Cuba from a press archive, what they would find would be the story of a country that didn't exist. Our mission was to bring reality back. The arrival of widespread Internet made us try our luck. Without that event, which transformed the nation, we wouldn't have had a chance. In 2015, the government installed Wi Fi hotspots in 35 public places. In those places, an hour of Internet cost $2. For the first time in their lives, Cubans could go outside and get online. The high price meant choosing between the Internet and clothes or food. But before, you could only use it in hotels, which cost even more, or at job centers. Cuba's constitution declares that the Communist Party, which is the only legal political organization, has regulatory jurisdiction over all radio, TV and print media. It also prohibits journalism outside this sphere. Starting an independent magazine meant declaring war on the government. We had no office, no money, and no Internet connection of our own. Our idea of what launching a publication really meant was hazy, but we had energy and determination, and that was what counted. If we couldn't get an Office, then the 35 public plazas with WI fi would be our offices. If we couldn't get money, we'd work for nothing until we could attract underwriters outside Cuba. We're going to take on all this work, we told ourselves, because the stories matter and the stories are here. All we have to do is go out, get them, and tell them. Well, What stories would we tell and how would we tell them? We decided that as an inviolable rule, we would be neither pro nor anti Castro. Instead, we'd be militant about rigorous reporting and clean writing. We'd give voice to those who had been silenced for decades. How often would we publish? Ideally, one feature a week. If we assumed that reporting and writing one would take each of us a month, we could set up a rotation. Beyond features, Carlos Manuel said he'd get two acquaintances of his to be columnists. Ivan de la Nue, an art critic who lived in Barcelona, and Juan Orlando Perez, a journalism professor at the University of Roehampton, London, who'd been fired from Tribuna de La Habana because he wrote a piece criticizing the government for raising taxes to print textbooks. About Jose Marti, Cuba's national poet and intellectual lodestar. I suggested a section we wound up calling Las Pildoras, in which we told ordinary Cubans life stories in short first person narratives that gave the magazine a burst of emotion. Last, we thought we could have some photo only stories. It would be nice if our features had a visual element too. What would we name our magazine? No one had a convincing pitch. Mine was El Escape, which was pretentious and seemed obvious even though it had no real background. We decided to vote, but it was a tie. Everyone picked their own idea. As we brainstormed, we heard a street vendor outside. We couldn't see him, but his voice floated in from the hall, calling, come on out, everyone. Come down and get my lemon and honey, It'll keep you warm. Help your cough, fight your colds. Stop your sneeze. Sneeze. That was it. Jumping, rebelling, expelling, reacting, acting. That street vendor whose face we never saw, gave us a concept. We were going to be the country's unavoidable physical reaction. El Estor Nudo, the SNEEZE. We raised the curtain on El estor Nudo on 14th March 2016. Only that day did we realize that in New York, exactly 124 years earlier, Jose Marti had founded the newspaper Patria with the goal of liberating Cuba from Spain. The first text we published was a declaration of our principles. We started by saying journalists are athletes and journalism is a marathon and we're getting arthritis from old media and its rules. We've decided to go back to the starting line. So here we are, independently founding an online magazine of long form reporting about Cuba. We're going to rummage through the vices and virtues of our society, describe regular people's regular lives, show you how our discoveries differ from what the powerful tell us. We hope these stories will eventually become small pieces in the puzzle. Of our time. We couldn't have chosen a better moment to launch, not just because Cubans could get online, but also because Cuba and the US had re established diplomatic relations, ending decades of Cold War, and the news attracted foreign media attention to the island. Cuba was trending, and all kinds of international outlets wanted us for local color. The BBC, Al Jazeera, Vice, Univision, Internazionale, and others paid to republish our content. That sporadic income, which wasn't enough for us to pay ourselves monthly salaries, was the only money we earned for two years, until we started to get funding from international organizations that support independent journalism. El Estor Nudo changed my routine. I took up residence in a park near my house. It was a square plaza full of trees and metal benches with a dry water fountain in the middle and a church on one side. If I wasn't out reporting or writing at home, I was there. It was my office. I'd sit in the shade of a leafy tree, on a bench or the ground or one of the enormous roots breaking through the soil. Sometimes, though, the tree dropped little brown fruits, inedible berries that stained everything and drove me into the glaring sun. If I had to, I'd work standing, sweating in shorts and sandals. I was never alone in the park. The Internet dealers kept me company. In order to get online, you bought cards at post offices and newsstands. Every park was swarming with young people who hoarded the cards, then split their connections using apps and Bluetooth. Renting their Illegal services cost $1 per hour, half the price of state Internet. Just like drug dealers, the Internet dealers roamed the park, selling their product in whispers, avoiding police persecution. Without them, many Cubans couldn't have afforded to talk to their relatives abroad. And as independent journalists, we certainly couldn't have spent so many hours online. When it rained, I'd huddle under the awning of a building that was close enough to a hotspot that I could work. When I had to upload a photo or video, I'd wait until after 11pm and ideally much later, when the park was almost empty. The connection was faster then. At peak hours, mid morning or anytime in the afternoon or evening, the park got so crowded that the network collapsed. I love to sit in the empty water fountain at night and watch the hundreds of people who come crowded around me, eyes locked on their smartphones and laptops and tablets. A hum drifted through the park. It was people talking to the family members they hadn't hugged in years, asking for clothes and food and soap, staring with eyes like Footballs at the world beyond their island, speeding into modernity after so much time stuck in the past, faces in the dusk illuminated by screens. The park was dark like the country, and the device's lights were little tunnels to the future. The magazine began to concentrate on the new society emerging along with the Internet in Cuba. Our detailed reporting agitated the government, which went from ignoring our existence to breathing down our necks. We discovered this change when they blocked our website on the island. From that moment on, people in Cuba have been unable to access El Estor Nudo except through technological tricks like VPNs that alter their geolocation. We lost a lot of readers that way, but we also got confirmation that our work was important. We went on reporting our stories. I hadn't written about sport since on Cuba, but that year, 2017, the Houston Astros and LA Dodgers were in the World Series, and each team had a Cuban Ulyeski Guriel and Yasiel Puig both had played for Cuba, but because they'd then gone to the U.S. the government had declared them traitors and erased them from history. And yet the whole country was thrilled that Guriel and Puig were playing against each other for the biggest trophy in baseball, our national game. I wanted to talk about our shared exaltation, our refusal to forget our stars. It struck me as a great chance to get back to covering sports. My idea was to watch the game surrounded by fans. I had two go to a hotel bar where everyone has to pay to enter, then meet the expensive obligation to eat and drink, or go to one of the many homes that had an illegal satellite, something the government forbade because they picked up international TV stations. I chose the second in Old Havana. I found a cluster of poor, crumbling buildings with an abundance of secret satellites. Fans were packed into pokey rooms to watch the game, and I squeezed in with them. I didn't get home until 2am I'd promised to write a feature about my night, but I was exhausted and smelled like a nightclub. I took a bath to wash the cigarette smoke off me, then thought, if I start to write now, I'll crap out halfway through. I should get a couple of hours sleep. I set my alarm for 5am and when it woke me up, I started to write. I poured myself a cup of coffee and worked until 7am when I realized the fan wasn't turning. My power was out. Whenever my neighborhood lost electricity early in the day, we didn't get it back until 4pm or 5pm I gathered my things and went to my mother's house. In central Havana to write. I got in an empty 1957 Chevrolet shared taxi. On the way, an unknown number called me. Hello, Abraham, the caller said, this is Major Roberto Carlos. I don't know any Major Roberto Carlos. I need to see you. I'm out. I can't talk today. Tomorrow would work. But who are you? I know you're out. I knocked on your door and nobody answered. Tell me where you are. I'm telling you I'm busy. Abraham, you seem to be missing the point. This is a police summons. Tell me where you are and I'll be there.
- [20:23]
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But why?
- [20:24]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
What's the issue? Tell me where you are and I'll explain. I arrived at my mother's house 10 minutes later. I saw a white Lara with the Ministry of the Interior's Crest park outside the building next door. I stuck my head out of the window and saw a man in hiking boots and greenish, corroded jeans that were worn at the thighs and patched at the crotch. Major Roberto Carlos. Accompanying him was a young, toothy man, 25 at the most, a henchman. Over the next hours he didn't speak a word. The only people at home were my grandparents. My mother was at work, my little sister was at the university. And my older sister, who was very pregnant and on maternity leave. In Cuba you get six weeks before the birth, had gone to spend a few days with my father. Rather than wait anxiously upstairs, I went down to the street Abadam. We need you to answer some questions at the station. We need to look at your laptop and mobile phone too, so if you don't have them here, we'll have to go get them right now. Carlos said calmly, let your grandparents know everything's alright. Make something up for them, then come with me. I took my chance to go upstairs and call my father, who had retired from the Ministry of the Interior months earlier. I explained the situation and he said not to let them take me. He'd be right there with my sister, who worked at the Ministry too. Her boss had called that morning to say he and two of their colleagues wanted to see how she was doing. My sister's boss said I'd been under surveillance for months and was now going to be detained. He said they proved that I, her brother, was heading down the wrong path, that I was part of a subversive project, that I earned my living freelancing for foreign media when I should be writing for Grandma, that I wrote harshly about the government and then went out to dinner with foreign friends and diplomats. He said I'd become dangerous. My father and sister arrived quickly. I went downstairs. They asked me what I'd done and I said nothing. My father then went to Carlos and asked whether I'd committed a crime, what was happening, where they wanted to take me. Carlos said again that they had to ask me some questions and that I'd be back in a few hours. My father replied that he'd spent 39 years working for State Security and was well aware of how often they said one thing and and did another. He knew many cases of people who were told they were just going to clear something up, then didn't see daylight for years. He knew that could happen to me. I watched them talk for half an hour before I got sick of it. I got up from my chair, picked up the backpack and said I was ready to go where they wanted, answer their questions and be done. The silent henchman opened the lad as rear door and got in beside me, leaving the passenger seat empty. The Soviet era car's windows were shut and it was stifling. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father, sisters and grandparents standing in front of the house. As we pulled away, I waved as if I was leaving the country for a long time. Thanks for listening to the Guardian Long read. We'll be back after this.
- [24:16]
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- [24:47]
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- [25:51]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
Welcome back to the guardian long read. We drove to a police station at the edge of Havana at Calle Sien and Avenida Aldabo. Carlos told the silent henchman to sit me down at the back of the building, where another agent came and took my phone and laptop with him, down a little long haul. Fifteen minutes later, Carlos came back. Come with me, he said and escorted me to a very small room with two armchairs, a sofa, which he sat on, a desktop computer on a glass table, and a huge air conditioner that claimed it was set to an unobjectionable 23 Celsius. Though the room was so cold I felt it if I'd just arrived in Alaska. I spent my 11 hours of detention listening to threats, blackmail and gibberish. The major made it clear that if I kept writing, the state would prosecute and incarcerate me. He also demonstrated how much they knew about me. Every step I took, every word I spoke, it was humiliating. I felt naked when I entered the police station. I had to surrender my watch. Inside, there was no natural light. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Eventually the interrogation devolved into a monologue about the revolution and its historical enemy, the U.S. fidel and Raul, and the great humanity of the Ministry of the Interior. He told me to think of my mother and father, my sisters, my relatives. My attitude wasn't good for them. They made me write the record of the moral outrage they had subjected me to every ultimatum, every bit of extortion, every second of those 11 hours. It's illegal for a detainee to write his own statement. It's also an ingenious workaround for a lazy resource, poor repressor with a broken computer or maybe a printer without ink. I left exhausted and paranoid. I knew I had no privacy and no shelter from the arbitrary regime. It was destabilizing. For the first time in my life, I felt defenseless and abandoned. It was my first interrogation, first detention, my first time seeing the eyes and tentacles of state security, Cuba's jailer. That day was a watershed in my life. It broke something inside me. From then on, I behaved differently, distancing myself from my family, friends and colleagues, I became a lone wolf. I was protecting my life, my work and my privacy. But I also couldn't walk more than a few feet without looking both ways and behind me. I rarely answered calls and avoided unnecessary conversations in person. Even with the rest of the magazine staff, I decided not to have relationships. After a few went badly because I was so uncommunicative and closed off, I bought a bicycle to avoid buses and taxis. When I was reporting, I told sources I would call them. Since I had no phone, I never even used the same public telephone. That was my strategy for defending myself from state security. By the end of 2018, the only Estor Nudo founders left in Cuba were me and Michael Gonzalez. The others hadn't quit the magazine, but they'd all emigrated. Just like most Cubans who leave, they wanted better lives, hope for the future. We'd added three young reporters to our staff, bringing a welcome breath of fresh air. After that year, our situation worsened. The government extended Internet access so that rather than clustering in parks, Cubans could go online on their phones. The Internet swiftly became a vector of change, connecting activists and opposition groups from communities across the island and in exile. In order to counter this unwelcome side effect, freedom of thought, the regime cranked up its repressive tactics to an absurd degree. It became a pattern that when I'd tried to take out the rubbish or buy groceries, plain clothes agents would bar me from the street. I never got an arrest warrant, but I couldn't leave my house. A police cordon kept me indoors. The government cut off my Internet, mobile phone and landline. I was isolated and monitored by police officers who watched me through the windows. I couldn't visit sick relatives if I didn't have food at home, then I didn't eat. The Washington Post made me a columnist in 2020, though I'd been writing for them since 2019. I was buoyed up by their prestige, but it irritated the regime. One morning, a police officer knocked on my door with a summons. I had to report to a police station and 24 hours to be interrogated. I had just woken up, and I didn't bother asking for a reason. The next day, I got up, tried to relax with a cup of tea on the balcony, got dressed and left without my phone, keys, wallet, or anything else the cops could steal or confiscate. I got to the station half an hour early and sat on the curb down the street. After 20 minutes, two cars pulled up and so I approached. To my surprise, through the windows, I saw that the building was full not of police officers, but construction workers. I checked the warrant. I hadn't mixed up the address. I was in the right place. I went in. Behind me, a man asked Abraham. I turned. Five men were watching me. Go ahead, one said. I walked through cement dust, broken blocks, sacks of gravel, tools scattered over the floor. My legs were shaking. They directed me to a room with a single window. One of the men drew the blinds. Sit down, another said. They surrounded my chair. The room was airless. No one spoke. They watched me. I was intensely nervous. Eventually the oldest man, whom I assumed was the boss, said, clothes off. We need to be sure you're not wearing a wire. That's not going to happen, I managed to say. It's a violation of my rights. It's happening, said the man I thought was the boss. Then he signaled to one of his colleagues, a heavily muscled man, over six feet tall. When the enforcer took a step towards me, the others fell back. He looked me hard in the eyes. I made myself hold his stare. Then he put on a pair of rubber gloves. What are those for? I asked. Clothes off, he said. I saw the anger in his eyes and obeyed. It was the worst humiliation of my life. I felt like shit, like meat, like a corpse washed up on the beach. Once I was naked, the other four men watched as the enforcer ordered me to put my hands against the wall and spread my legs. My nose, mouth and eyes brushed the concrete wall. I wanted to weep or die. Then I felt the enforcer's hand in my hair. He searched everywhere he wanted. Get dressed, he said when he was done, but don't sit down. As I put my clothes on, he took out handcuffs. When I was done, he said, turn around. Then roughly shackled my hands behind my back and led me with the other agents to one of the cars I'd seen earlier. We eventually pulled up at Villa Marista, the notorious headquarters of State Security, the regime's political police force. It's a shadowy parastatal institution that was designed to protect the regime, though legally it doesn't exist. Like the Mafia, it works in secrecy, and yet its power and reach are easy to see. No one knows how many agents are on its payroll, but any Cuban can tell you its real roster of workers is endless. One of State Security's main goals, as well as being a central source of its strength, is turning civilians into informers. State Security is in every municipality, every province, every job center, and every public employee is a potential collaborator. It surveils everyone from government ministers to street vendors, it's Fidel Castro's monster, created in the image of the Stasi and KGB to maintain the conditions here he wanted. But like any monster, it outgrew the need for a master. No one tells it what to do anymore. It gobbles up every scrap of freedom in Cuba of its own accord. Villa Marista generates more fear than anywhere else in the country. No one wants to go there or hear about it. Cubans say that there even mute people talk. An enforcer led me through the entryway. Then he uncuffed my wrists and left me alone in a room for 10 minutes. A very young agent, maybe 20, came in, along with Lt. Col. Kenya Maria Morales Larrea. She was infamous. Two gold chains dangled outside her uniform. Her nails were long pink claws, and her hands were loaded with more gold. For years, she had interrogated any dissident or artist who challenged the regiment. She looked at me as if she wanted to slit my throat. Her manner made it clear that she loathed me and found me repulsive. Likewise, ma', am, I thought. Then the interrogation began. It was a farce. The agents rotated, one repressor giving way to the next. Each of them had their own strategy, good cop or bad. But the questions never changed. Nor did their central allegation that I was a US Acid, recruited by the Washington Post. Eventually I was left alone for long enough to fall asleep. Four agents woke me up. Now they're bringing in gangs, I thought they shouted, insulted me, twisted my words. I started to think I was going to wind up in jail. But then Morales got out a document and sign and you can leave. The statement declared that if I ever wrote for the Post again, they'd initiate the process to declare me an enemy propagandist. I read it several times before refusing to sign. Morales exploded. She got in my face, yelling and slashing at me with her sword like nails, threatening, your family's done for. I made myself remain silent and still. You're going to prison, she spat eventually, then stormed out and slammed the door. Three other agents followed in her wake, and I was alone again. After a while, the enforcer and his colleagues from the morning returned. The enforcer handcuffed me and shoved me into the same car. They returned me to the construction site station and let me go. I walked home decimated. My hands were shaking, I was sweating. I had marks on my wrists. Now what? I asked myself. I wrote a column for the Washington Post that night entitled. If this is my last column here, it's because I've been imprisoned in Cuba. It ran the next day. In it, I describe what had happened to me and explained the reason to my readers. The accounts of life in Cuba that I publish every month are part of what the Cuban government wants to keep under lock to protect the progressive image that it tries to cultivate worldwide. Part of the essence of totalitarian regimes is to silence the voices that narrate the most subversive aspects of daily life. I was one of those voices, and I knew they could imprison me if I didn't shut up. A few days later, at home one night with nothing to do, I turned on the television and saw my face on the screen. The evening news was broadcasting my interrogation. State Security had clandestinely recorded it, and now they were showing it to the island. I'd been on national TV once before. It was when I played baseball as a boy. A US team came to play against mine as part of the Pastors for Peace Caravan, a non profit based in New York. I was an outfielder, but for some reason I spent that game on first base. My first time at bat, I struck out. My second time, I got a hit to right field. But that's not what was on tv. I still remember the exact order of events from watching it. Later, a blonde American kid hit a grounder to third. The shot tracked the ball to my friend Ernesto's glove, then to mine, and the game ended. The camera stayed on me as I sprinted to the batter's box to celebrate with Eloy, a great southpaw pitcher. I lost track of him and Ernesto and the rest of the team. The broadcast ended on a shot of us clutching a Cuban flag that our coach, Maximo Garcia, a legend of Cuban baseball, ran to bring us. I knew I was being filmed that day. I was completely conscious that I was participating in a public event with cameras. And later I sat at my grandfather's feet to watch myself on the news. The second time I was on tv, that same news program broadcast my image without my consent. I looked at the screen without recognizing myself. It wasn't me. It was my body, My gestures. And my voice made clear that I was under duress. Under interrogation, no one can be their true self. Certainly not if you haven't committed a crime, or if you know every word you say will be used against you. The government wanted to kneecap my reputation. It wanted to convince the Cuban public that I was a CIA agent. The banner under my image said so. When the show ended, I went out to the balcony. I hadn't prepared myself for that that broadcast put my sources, family and friends in danger. From that moment on, speaking to me meant speaking to a national enemy. I was a political outcast. I'd just been condemned to civic death. Thanks again for listening to the Guardian Long read. That was I launched Cuba's first independent magazine, and that's when my troubles began. By Abraham Jimenez Enoah, read by Sebastian Capitan Viveros and produced by Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Eli Burey. Abram Jimenez Enoa was forced to leave Cuba and now lives in exile in Spain. Translation by Lily Meyer. This essay is an edited excerpt from A Terizar en el Landing in the World, published in Spanish by Libros del Cao. A version of this piece appeared in the dialogue the Dial World.
- [44:38]
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For more Guardian long reads in text and a selection in audio, go to theguardian.com longread.
- [44:55]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
This is the Guardian Foreign.
- [45:04]
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He's dribbling the ball with everything on the line. He's driving down the pitch. He's facing price hikes and cuts past him. Carrier contracts tries to block him. Oh, he leaves him in the dust. He's at the edge of the box. He cuts past the non stop group chat trash talk. He clears on goal. He shoots. No unlimited data for $25 a month forever. Visit your local Boost Mobile store today to get unlimited data with a price that never changes. Boost mobile after 30gb, customers may experience lower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost $25 Unlimited plan.
- [45:35]
Wayfair Advertiser
You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank. Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside, Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70% off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance score. Huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs and more.
- [45:52]
Abraham Jimenez Enoa
More.
- [45:53]
Wayfair Advertiser
We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget, plus surprise flash deals. July 6th don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com Wayfair every style, every home. Former politics reporter Jane Coston is now hosting Crooked Media's daily news podcast. What a day. Five days a week. With stories constantly flooding your for your page, it's hard to separate what matters from all the noise. That's why every weekday, Jane and the Whataday team scour the biggest headlines and bring you the stories that matter most to your life, all in just 20 minutes. Listen to what a Day wherever you get your podcast or subscribe to what a Day on YouTube for the video version.