The journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez tried to return to Cuba this Sunday from Miami, but the employees of the American Airlines company told him that he could not board the flight due to Havana’s refusal to authorize his entry into the country.
“‘You have been denied from Havana’ they told me”, wrote on his Facebook profile the freelance writer and reporter, who said he felt united in destiny with Anamely Ramos and Omara Ruiz Urquiola. The two activists have not been able to travel to the island from the US either due to the measures of the Cuban regime.
“I am calm, the pain is now permanent. I will explain the matter in more detail in a while,” added Álvarez, who has not yet given more information about it.
“I am calm, the pain is now permanent. I will explain the matter in more detail in a while”
The journalist, collaborator of various international media such as The country, New York Times, BBC Y Washington Postis one of the founders of the independent Cuban media The sneeze Y won in 2021 the King of Spain journalism award for his reporting three cuban girlsin which he recounted the collapse of a balcony on a street in Old Havana, which killed three minors who were returning from school.
“I want to believe that I have gone to the limit in confronting the direct injustice that has subjugated my country for decades, and that there is a secret prize in punishing the tyrant, because your dignity has made it reveal its nature, something that the tyrant always wants to hide,” he said.
The author warned that he is willing to return “by any other means” and to organize with Cubans who also want to do so. “The return of a full community is perhaps the path we have left. On the other hand, from Heredia to Arenas, I also belong to exile,” he concluded.
Alvarez already mentioned on a previous occasion the option of boarding “a peaceful flotilla” to return to Cuba. “I think that they are throwing us to the moment in which we will have to contemplate it as something imminent and unavoidable. It is a practical, feasible operation that we citizens can carry out,” he argued.
The writer, who has lived in the US for several years, returned to Havana in 2020 to accompany the protests of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and was detained by State Security, who detained him for several hours before forcibly transferring him to Cárdenas, in Matanzas, where he is from and where his parents live. Despite this, shortly after he was able to fulfill his intention to reach the capital.
“I think that they are throwing us to the moment in which we will have to contemplate it as something imminent and unavoidable. It is a practical, feasible operation that we citizens can do”
The author characterized his arrest as a kidnapping, since unidentified civilians put him against his will in a vehicle without telling him where he was going. “This is an absolute civil death, this cannot be seen as arrests or as low-intensity pressure, but rather as the absolute formalization of the prison throughout the national territory,” he denounced.
The siege against the reporter intensified due to his support for the hunger strike that several activists of the San Isidro Movement, led by Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, began to demand the release of Denis Solís, then in prison for contempt and currently in Germany after leaving of the island via Serbia in a forced exile agreement.
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