MIAMI, United States.- Independent writer and journalist Yoe Suárez told this Monday in an exclusive interview with CubaNet the reasons that led him into exile and the way in which he and his family have faced change and what it means to live in freedom.
Yoe Suárez arrived in the United States on August 23 in the company of his wife and four-year-old son. The three came in part thanks to the management of Outreach Aid to the Americas, initially to present the feature documentary Cuba Crucis: Faith and Individual Freedoms.
“We arrived thanks in part to the management of Outreach Aid for the Americas, an organization that does humanitarian aid work for Central America and the Caribbean and that was supporting the production of the documentary from Cuba,” Suárez told our journalist Camila Acosta.
“We arrived with the idea of starting our life from scratch in a place of freedom. The United States, and specifically Miami, was that place to do the blending between the land we were leaving behind and the new life we were beginning to live,” he added.
Regarding the reasons that led him to leave Cuba, Suárez recalled the relentless repression and the threats against his family for his work as an independent journalist.
“I was regulated for two years,” he said, adding that from 2020 to 2022, “approximately every three weeks there was a repressive action against me or against my family. My mother, who had never been in a police station, was summoned for questioning three times, to threaten her that if I continued with my journalistic work she would suffer the consequences, ”she revealed.
“There were also threats about my son. In April 2020, a man who called himself Jorge told me that he could lose custody of my son because the child was being raised by a counterrevolutionary. I did not want to expose my son to having to say ‘Pioneers for communism’, or to the indoctrination that now comes with the new legality of the regime”, explained the journalist.
Yoe Suarez recounted that the recording of the documentarywhich began in 2019 as a series of interviews with religious practitioners and leaders in Cuba, was conducted clandestinely.
“It was an underground documentary that we filmed during the toughest moment of the pandemic.
The audiovisual brings together testimonies of religious practitioners, as well as activists who have also been persecuted on the Island for their way of thinking. Cuba Crusis addresses how the lack of religious freedoms in Cuba affects living the faith to the full”, she stated.
For its realization, Suárez relied on a group of friends who assisted him in the filming and editing of the audiovisual piece.
“We went from one place to another with the phone in airplane mode so that State Security would not track us,” said the young man, who has already spent several years witnessing the Cuban reality with his work as a reporter.
In 2021 Yoe Suárez was the winner of the Iliad Awardpromoted by Iliada Ediciones and the magazine Another Monday, “with a heartbreaking and courageous book about the hidden face of the political police against the intelligentsia and independent journalism.”
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