MIAMI, United States. – Two members of the Cuban audiovisual project Fuera de la Caja denounced in a video on Facebook that “a State Security agent” went to his home this Wednesday at noon with the “pretext” of carrying out “a kind of census” of the building’s residents.
Both young people considered the incident as an act of harassment. Organizations addressing human rights violations in Cuba have described the same modus operandi of State Security agents posing as officials of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), anti-mosquito campaign workers Aedes Aegypti or even by family members and friends of their “persons of interest” to harass and threaten independent civil society.
“Today [miércoles 11 de febrero]During lunch time, a State Security agent, a MININT agent, who identified himself as Dainel Correa Quintana, arrived at our house. He came under the pretext of doing a kind of census on the people who lived in the building, which we found suspicious,” explained the first of the young people.
“My dad refused to give him any information,” he added.
The alleged State Security agent had previously tried to locate the young people through other relatives. “Before coming here, he stopped by my grandmother’s house, posing as a friend of mine, and they sent him to where I normally am,” he said.
The other member of the project maintained that they were expecting an episode of surveillance or pressure: “We knew that this was going to happen, that the persecution was going to start at any moment. But thinking is not a crime, expressing yourself is not a crime. Let them know that we are going to continue making videos, that they are not going to intimidate us, that they are not going to silence us,” she said.
He also asked his audience to amplify the complaint: “To our followers, thank you for your support, ask you to share this video so that it reaches more voices, more people. Thank you very much for everything.”
Fuera de la Caja is a young collective that publishes critical content from the Island and that, amid the increase in arrests and threats against independent creators, has used its networks to denounce repression and express solidarity with other projects.
In its public presentation, the group has spread José Martí’s phrase “Freedom is the right of every man to be honest, and to think and speak without hypocrisy.” The project accumulates thousands of followers on social networks.
In recent days, Fuera de la Caja has been at the center of a public controversy related to the use of hats with the phrase “Make Cuba Great Again”, an adaptation of the “Make America Great Again” slogan popularized by Donald Trump supporters in the United States.
The controversy intensified after a segment of the propaganda program With edgefrom Cuban Television (state and only), which linked the use of that cap with extremist positions and with alleged calls for violence.
The young people responded in a video that their message had been “distorted” and that the slogan did not imply support for foreign politicians or external agendas, but rather an aspiration for changes in Cuba. Along these lines, they defended that the use of the cap expressed the desire for a country where “staying is a pride, not a sacrifice.”
The controversy occurred in parallel with the arrest in Holguín of Ernesto Ricardo Medina and Kamil Zayas Pérez, creators of the audiovisual project El4tico. A source close to the case informed relatives of the young people that they would be prosecuted for “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “instigation to commit a crime.”
The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) demanded the release of the founders of El4tico, as did the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which condemned the arrest and linked it to restrictions on access to information on the Island.
