The independent reporter Abraham Jiménez Enoa received this Thursday the International Press Freedom Award granted by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The Cuban, the only Hispanic nominated this year, in his thank you speech dedicated the award to his colleagues Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca and Jorge Bello Domínguez, currently imprisoned on the island.
The Cuban government, Jiménez Enoa said during the reception ceremony in New York, treats the independent journalist “as a delinquent, as a criminal, for the simple reason of wanting to show the citizens of that country the reality where they live.”
“Making the decision not to let what is happening in my country die, to bring the facts to light, puts the physical and mental integrity of those of us at risk,” added the co-founder of the digital magazine The sneeze .
Jiménez Enoa, exiled in Spain since the end of last year, denounced in 2020 that the Cuban authorities handcuffed him, interrogated him and threatened legal retaliation if he continued writing for The Washington Post, medium with which he collaborates since 2019.
In his columns for ‘The Washington Post’, Jiménez Enoa has addressed issues such as police violence and racism
“There is no possible way to leave ourselves without a voice. Cuban journalists are going to denounce its excesses until the last second of the life of the Cuban dictatorship, even if we have to pay a very high price for it,” said the 33-year-old journalist upon receiving the award. .
Jiménez Enoa is also a columnist for Leopard and has collaborated in other international media, such as BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Univisión, and Cubans, such as OnCuba Y The touch.
Along with the independent Cuban reporter, the 2022 awards were the journalist Niyaz Abdullah, from Iraqi Kurdistan; the Ukrainian Sevgil Musaieva, director of Ukrainian Pravda, and the Vietnamese Pham Doan Trang, who has been imprisoned since last December.
in his columns for The Washington PostJiménez Enoa has addressed issues such as police violence and racism, the debate on homosexual marriage or the poor condition of buildings and the problem of access to housing in Havana.
These are issues that are rarely reflected with a critical perspective by the island’s state press, but are constantly addressed in the independent media. In the last two years, journalists who work for unofficial media have denounced an increase in pressure from the authorities to prevent them from doing their work, from police summons to house arrests, confiscation of tools or restrictions on access to the Internet.
This police repression and the draconian legislation against freedom of expression that are maintained on the Island have caused a exodus of reporters For this reason, independent Cuban journalism has had to reinvent itself several times.
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