SLP, Mexico.- Yndamiro Restano Díazpioneer of the Cuban independent press, died this Wednesday, January 1 in Miami at the age of 76, as confirmed by his daughter and friends on social networks.
Restano, who in 1985 began writing a clandestine information bulletin titled NNew Cubawhich he distributed in the streets of Havana, leaves behind a great legacy for the Cuban independent press.
“From very early on he was a fighter for justice in Cuba. He was imprisoned. He was always a pacifist and created the MAR movement in Cuba. He was almost expelled from Cuba, from prison to exile. Great poet and thinker. It’s a great shame. My condolences to his children but especially to Esthercita his daughter. What bad news for the beginning of the year,” wrote her friend and former neighbor Isel Pujol on January 1.
For her part, his daughter, Esther Restano, left a message on Facebook where her pain over her father’s death was clear.
The Cuban professor, writer and journalist Leonides Pentón recalled that Yndamiro dedicated his life to freedom of the Press and was the founder in Cuba of the Independent Press Agency of Cuba (APIC).
He won the Golden Feather of Freedom award and was also widely known for his work in favor of Cuban freedom. He was the founder, along with Fabio Hurtado and Leonides Pentón, of the Armonía Movement.
“His work within the dissident intellectuality of Cuba earned him the respect of everyone and, as is known, the repressive response of the communist regime of the Island. He suffered imprisonment and was able to get out of it thanks to the solidarity of the French government,” he wrote.
The desire to inform Cubans about events different from those narrated by the country’s official press and the “desire to show the contrasts of the Cuban reality and denounce the failures of the regime,” made Restano one of the first independent journalists in Cuba. , picked up the magazine Cubaencuentro.
“I understood that the ideological apparatus of the party-state imposed duties on me that I did not want to perform. One of them was not to write what was happening with the inefficient agricultural companies (…) The temptation to say what really happens is irresistible for a journalist. More so when it comes to an economic catastrophe like the one I had before my eyes,” he communicated 10 years ago, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the creation of the first Cuban alternative press agency, the Association of Independent Journalists of Cuba.
After creating the Harmony Movement (MAR) in 1990, which proposed the establishment of a plural regime and free elections, on December 21, 1991, when the Association of Independent Journalists of Cuba was going to publish the first issue of a clandestine newspaper titled The OpinionRestano was arrested and taken to Villa Marista.
He was imprisoned and declared prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. Through the intercession of the then first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, he was finally released on June 1, 1995.
After a trip to Europe, the authorities prevented him from entering the country and he settled in Miami, from where he continued his work for the independent press.
In 1995 he founded the Independent Press Bureau of Cuba (BPIC), an organization that brought together the Havana Journalists’ Circle and the Patria and Habana Press agencies. It had 21 press correspondents in different provinces of the Island.
