Meet Abraham Jiménez Enoa (@JimenezEnoa), a Cuban journalist and 2023 Oslo Freedom Discussion board speaker.
Jiménez Enoa is aware of fairly nicely what it seems to be wish to dwell below a Communist regime, rising up in a household of senior army figures within the Cuban authorities. His grandfather, as an illustration, served as a bodyguard for Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
He deserted his Communist household ties, turning into a journalist — he’s a columnist for the Washington Publish and a co-founder of El Estornudo, the primary impartial Cuban journal devoted to literary journalism — he is aware of what it’s wish to pay the worth for leaving: He was pressured to flee to Spain in 2021, the place he now lives in exile.
“I used to be put below home arrest. My telephone was bugged. I used to be later arrested, handcuffed, strip-searched, and questioned by safety officers. Then they secretly filmed me and put my picture on tv, claiming I used to be a CIA spy,” Jimenez Enoa informed VOA. “Later, they telephoned me and stated I needed to go away the nation or they might put me in jail and ‘terminate’ my household and the household of my spouse.”
And so he left — however continued to jot down about it.
In 2022, he was awarded the CPJ’s Worldwide Press Freedom Award. He additionally wrote about it in “La isla oculta” (The Hidden Island), a set of tales of odd Cubans residing below the dictatorship.
“I inform a little bit of what life in Cuba is like, what life was like throughout my childhood, my youth. How I grew to become a journalist, what it’s wish to be a journalist in Cuba, how I left Cuba, why I left Cuba, through which method,” he stated. “So it’s a journey ahead and a journey backward as nicely. It’s a journey towards capitalism by somebody who doesn’t know something about it. Nevertheless it’s additionally a journey from the Cuban dictatorship, in direction of different dictatorships: The dictatorship of consumption, the dictatorship of racism, of xenophobia, of the West, in a roundabout way.”
Jiménez Enoa and different changemakers will likely be sharing their tales on the Oslo Konserthus stage this June for the fifteenth annual Oslo Freedom Discussion board.
