Cuban activist Juan Eduardo Moreno, son of the journalist and director of the Amanecer Habanero media outlet and a leader of the Cuban Women’s Network, was deported to Havana on Monday, January 17, after Daniel Ortega’s regime denied him entry to Nicaragua.
“They did not allow me to fulfill my dream of fleeing from the hell of persecution and misery that living in Cuba means,” he recounted in an interview with CONFIDENCIAL.
Moreno spent almost two days in a migratory limbo in El Salvador, where he arrived on Saturday, January 15, legally from the island. “I left Havana normally, nobody told me that I could not travel and when I was two minutes away from taking the flight to Managua, after having passed through Panama, they informed me that I could not get on because the Nicaraguan government denied me entry. ”, he counted.
The Salvadoran authorities kept him “guarded” and did not want to provide me with information, nor did they allow me to communicate with anyone to request political asylum. “Even the first night I had to sleep on the floor,” he said.
The young man is the son of Cuban journalist Juan Manuel Moreno and activist Zelandia de la Caridad Pérez Abreu. “My parents are well-known opponents in Cuba and I began to feel pressure and threats from State Security towards me, for what I wanted and I continue to think about leaving this country,” he said.
Interrogated upon his return to Cuba
The father of the young man stated that there was complicity between the dictatorships of Cuba and Nicaragua, since it is clear that they prohibited him from entering because he was the son of “people who confront the murderous Castro dictatorship of Díaz-Canel.”
Moreno arrived in Havana on Monday, January 17 at 11:40 p.m. and was expected by Immigration and State Security officials. “Several officials questioned me for almost two hours and told me that the fault lay with the airline Avianca and the Government of Nicaragua, that they had nothing to do with it,” he said.
They also demanded that he “stop posting false news”, otherwise he could “suffer the consequences”, which he takes as a clear threat of imprisonment.
Whereabouts of two Cuban journalists unknown
last 4th of january Cuban journalists Héctor Valdés and Esteban Rodríguez They received support and assistance from the Government of El Salvador after the Ortega regime denied them entry to Nicaragua. Both denounced their exile from the island due to the repression of the Cuban regime. Rodríguez was released the day of his trip, after eight months in prison for demonstrating peacefully.
The General Directorate of Migration and Immigration of El Salvador reported on January 11, in a statement, that both abandoned the refugee application process in that country.
The text details that both, “voluntarily”, requested refugee status from the Secretariat of the Commission for the Determination of Refugees, for which the Salvadoran authorities activated the protocols of “protection and humanitarian assistance due to their status as refugees”. vulnerability” and notified the Office of the High Commissioner for the United Nations (Acnur).
Valdés and Rodríguez exposed in their request “the situation of political persecution for which they were forced to leave their country alleging torture, intimidation, threats and other humiliations against them and their families.”
We inform the Salvadoran people and the organizations that protect human rights, as well as journalism in general, of the following statement on the case of Cuban journalists Héctor Valdés and Esteban Rodríguez: pic.twitter.com/0uAKe7GMNq
– Ricardo Cucalón (@R_Cucalon) January 11, 2022
Neither of them, however, appeared at the refugee hearing, so the appointment was rescheduled, but they did not appear either, so they closed with the request “due to abandonment of the case by the interested parties.”
“As part of the protection protocol for refugee applicants, an attempt was made to locate them in the accommodation that was offered by the Government of El Salvador after their arrival in the country, but they were not there and their location is unknown to date,” reiterates the statement.
