SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, Mexico.- The announcer Cuban Marisela Alfonso Madrigal He left Cuba in June, heading for Spain. The news broke in media Cuban independents, who did not fail to note that, from the Havana airport, Marisela posed for a photo along with the certificate of discharge from OFICODA.
Recently, in an interview with the presenter and announcer Abel AlvarezAlfonso revealed that he feared for his fate in Cuba.
“I went into forced exile. I left Cuba to avoid going to jail, to avoid sacrificing myself for a people, a people that is not capable of uniting, and I include myself in that,” she said.
The journalist had stopped practising her profession and even received threats from State Security for her controversial posts on social media, mainly from her YouTube channel, La Madrigal.
In the interview she admitted that she lived in fear of the repercussions her criticism of the regime could have. Having had a Spanish passport to visit her son in the Canary Islands, she feared being told she was regulated and being prevented from travelling.
From exile, Marisela feels pain in Cuba and calls for change. She admitted that she was protesting from her own little piece of land and with her own means, because her family would receive reprisals.
“I was never going to call on people to do what I didn’t do, because I didn’t go out into the street with a banner. And besides, we have repression, a dictatorship, you know that people can’t go out like they did on July 11. Where are they all? Where are all those children, all those young people who also peacefully went out to protest against that dictatorship and shout for change?” he asked.
“I cry for Cuba, I cry for the Cubans, because when I arrived here last year (Spain) and I saw all this, I said ‘what have they done to us?’ They have stolen our lives, they have stolen our dreams, they have stolen our freedom and it hurts.”
In Cuba, his family and his wife feared for his fate. His partner, Adriana, said she thought that State Security agents would come looking for Marisela. “She constantly thought that they would come knocking on my door, that they would take me if they saw a patrol car outside my house.”
At the beginning of 2023, Miguel Angel Jimeneza Spanish chef based in Cuba and very close to Lis Cuestacooked some sweets for children invited to the television. This provoked the indignation of mothers and fathers who cannot even think of buying or cooking these dishes for their children. Marisela was one of those who came forward and wrote on social networks that she considered it a mockery of Cubans.
At that time, she said, all the media wanted to interview her but she knew that if they did, she would go to jail.
From Spain, Marisela continues to question the repression and lack of freedoms in Cuba, which forces many to emigrate.
“I say, ‘Why do I have to leave Cuba, where I am a professional, I am a broadcaster, and I have to leave my mother, my father, my mother-in-law, my cats, my house?’ And I look and say, ‘I don’t have a house, I don’t have a house.’”
Marisela continues her denunciation of the Cuban reality from Spain. As she did from Cuba, on her YouTube channel The Madrigalexposes the crisis in which Cubans live and continues to aspire for freedom for all.
“It is not easy to arrive and start like this with nothing. But no one is going to take away my smile. No one is going to take away my dreams and above all, my freedom. From the moment I got on that plane, I breathed freedom.”
Follow our channel WhatsApp. Receive the information from CubaNet on your cell phone through Telegram.
