After catching their breath, journalist Yeris Curbelo Aguilera, his wife and their 15-year-old son looked around their home and saw a broken window, a ripped curtain and rocks covering the floor.
Minutes before, a group of men surrounded and attacked Curbelo Aguilera during his family’s Father’s Day outing in 2024.
The men overwhelmed him, punching and throwing rocks at him until he fell to the ground. They kicked him repeatedly, and as Curbelo Aguilera lifted his hand to shield himself, one of the assailants slashed it with a machete.
“Sometimes I still remember that moment, and I feel scared,” his wife Odalis Legrá Castellanos said in a phone interview from Cuba with Capital News Service. “There were so many people above him, hitting him.”
Bruised and bleeding, Curbelo Aguilera managed to escape, but the men followed the family home and continued pelting the house with rocks until the police arrived.
Police escorted the family to the hospital, where doctors stitched his hand with a sewing needle.
They expected to return home, but instead the police detained and arrested Curbelo Aguilera, charging him with causing mild injuries to his attackers. The couple was shocked.
“Remembering that day makes me sick,” Legrá Castellanos said.
Curbelo Aguilera is one of the few remaining independent journalists who promotes a free and democratic Cuba through his news coverage and activism. He works for Palenque Visión, an audiovisual outlet that produces documentary-style reports online. Occasionally, he reported for the partially U.S.-funded outlet, CubaNet, to reach Cuban audiences despite the Communist government’s blocking of unauthorized news and commentary on the airwaves and the internet.
Curbelo Aguilera, 40, had been arrested and imprisoned two times previously for his pro-democracy activism.
His 2024 attack and arrest illustrates the lengths the government will go to suppress independent media with subterfuge, violence and imprisonment when its usual fines, citations and threats do not work, said longtime Cuba watchers.
“They’re harassed constantly.” said Daniel Pedreira, president of the PEN Club of Cuban Writers in Exile, an advocacy group for freedom of expression. ”They try to make their work impossible and the conditions on the island impossible for them and try to basically force them out.”
A few months after the attack, in September 2024, the Guantánamo provincial court near where Curbelo Aguilera lives found him guilty of the attacks and sentenced him to two years in prison.
Only the man with the machete was also charged, but he was acquitted, local news accounts said.
The Cuban embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
While awaiting trial, Curbelo Aguilera released a video explaining that he believes the police orchestrated the attack and that his arrest was a punishment for ignoring citations to stop his reporting, which is often critical of the Cuba government.
“The regime holds a lot against me, a lot of resentment, because of my years of fighting for a free Cuba and, above all, for all the reports and other information I have shared with the world about the youth who protested in [the city of] Caimanera on May 6, 2023,” Curbelo Aguilera said in the video. He wore a T-shirt with the words, “Democracy Yes, Dictatorship No.”
Crisis and unrest
Since Cuba’s communist revolution in 1959, a single-party authoritarian regime has controlled the island nation 90 miles south of Florida.
During the revolution, in the midst of the Cold War, the country nationalized foreign assets and aligned itself with the Soviet Union. The Cuban constitution states all media must be owned by the state.
Various U.S. presidents have attempted to overthrow the regime. A U.S. trade embargo has lasted for six decades.
Today, Cuba faces one of its worst economic crises, experts said.
“Cuba really experienced a kind of perfect storm economically,” William LeoGrande, specialist in Latin American politics and U.S. foreign policy at American University, said.
He attributed the crisis to a severe decline in tourism revenue since the pandemic, tightened restrictions on remittance payments from families abroad and a reduction in Venezuelan oil in exchange for Cuban doctors.
Food and water shortages and severe blackouts led to unprecedented nationwide protests spread by social media in July 2021.
Media crackdown
The government has passed new laws limiting independent reporting online, fearing bad news will spark further anti-government sentiment and protests.
Under the 2019 Decree-Law 370, spreading information that goes against “social interest,” “morals” and “good customs” on social media can be penalized with detention and fines.
After the protests in 2021, the regime took things a step further.
It updated laws to penalize journalists who receive funds from foreign government-backed news outlets, such as RadioMartí, and can detain and fine people who like, share or comment on social media posts critical of the government. It also authorized the shut down of internet access during protests.
“You see this ramped up effort to expand suppression against freedom of speech and expression, which obviously affects journalists as well,” Pedreira said. “Independent journalism has really been decimated in the past few years with all these laws.
In the last three years, threats, attacks and arbitrary imprisonment of independent journalists and dissidents have increased significantly, according to the Cuban Institute of Freedom of Expression and the Press, a Cuba-based nonprofit that advocates for press freedom.
In 2023, the group reported 494 violations of freedom of expression and the press. In 2024 that figure rose to 790. As of August, the group had already registered 909 violations.
“Long live free Cuba!”
On a warm night early in May 2023 in the fishing village of Caimanera, just north of the U.S. Naval Base on Guantánamo Bay, protesters took to the streets once again.
“Long live free Cuba!” they shouted, voicing grievances about the severe food shortages and worsening blackouts.
That night, the government took strict measures to avoid copycat protests like those in 2021. It cut internet access in Caimanera and downplayed the severity of the protest in the only state-owned television news channel Canal Caribe, according to independent news outlet elTOQUE.
Curbelo Aguilera, who lives in Caimanera, covered the protest and its aftermath for Palenque Visión and CubaNet.
He interviewed the angry and distraught families of young demonstrators who were detained. On video, they told him about the poor conditions of the protesters in detention and intimidation by police to change their testimonies.
Palenque Visión Director Rolando Rodríguez Lobaina, said he made sure his longtime friend knew the dangers associated with this work.
In an interview with CNS, Rodríguez Lobaina says he told his friend, “This has a consequence. You know that, right? Do you agree?”
Rodríguez Lobaina says Curbelo Aguilera responded, “I have a commitment, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Prison in Cuba
When Legrá Castellanos goes to visit her husband in Guantánamo’s Combinado Provincial, a large Cuban prison complex about 21 miles northwest of the U.S. prison housing Al Qaeda prisoners, she must give her belongings to the guards for review.
“They search everything, even the food,” Legrá Castellanos said. “They stir it with a spoon to see if you’re hiding anything. When you bring soda or coffee, they shake the bottles to see if there’s anything in there.”
Every three weeks, the couple is allotted two supervised hours together in a visiting room.
His wife said the prison denied her husband the ability to participate in prison work outside. He told her he rarely, if ever, sees the sun.
“We view this as a form of repression against him for his political activism,” she said. “It’s a way of making his sentence harder, to make him feel more pain and more suffering.”
In October, his wife said Curbelo Aguilera contracted dengue fever, which is endemic to the island, and has recovered.
Legrá Castellanos said her husband is scheduled for early release in May. She expects he will continue his work when he gets out.
“Here [in Cuba], people only know what others tell them… and [his work] is a way to share the message so that the people know what is truly happening,” she said. “We are always going to support him because he fights for a free and democratic Cuba.”