In late 2021, the Cuban dictatorship gave Abraham Jiménez Enoa a choice: go to prison or go into exile. Jiménez Enoa chose the latter. But, holding a Cuban passport, where can you go? Your options are limited — to Nicaragua, Russia, and a few other such lands. Jiménez Enoa’s girlfriend looked for a job in Spain, and found one, and Jiménez Enoa was able to join her there. A happy landing, just about the best-case scenario.
Jiménez Enoa deserves it, with all he’s been through.
He and I are sitting down, not in Spain, but in Norway — at the Oslo Freedom Forum. Jiménez Enoa is a journalist and writer, the author of La isla oculta (“The Hidden Island”). He is an unlikely dissident — an unlikely rebel against the Castro dictatorship.
Abraham Jiménez Enoa was born in 1988 to a revolutionary family. His grandfather was a bodyguard to both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. His father was a colonel in the interior ministry. This was a strongly pro-regime family, a faithful family, if you will. Guevara was the padrino of Abraham’s grandparents’ wedding. A padrino is a kind of patron, or sponsor.
When did Abraham start to have doubts? Doubts about the regime and its legitimacy and its goodwill? When he was a university student, really. His parents were alarmed, as you can imagine. And when Abraham went into dissidence, they were scared — scared because very bad things happen to dissidents in Cuba. (Bad things happen to their families, too.)
At the University of Havana, Jiménez Enoa studied journalism. He became especially fond of the “new journalism,” as exemplified by Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. He had grown up as a baseball player, and would have liked to make his living in that sport. But he did not quite have the natural gifts. He turned to sportswriting.
I say to him, “Sportswriting must be relatively safe in Cuba — just about the safest kind of journalism you can practice.” Not necessarily, says Jiménez Enoa. Athletes in Cuba work for the government. Sometimes they try to escape, by boat; sometimes they try to defect, when abroad. “If you’re going to be a serious journalist,” says Jiménez Enoa, “you have to tell those stories.”
He makes a general point, which may be obvious, but not obvious to all: In Cuba, “the media don’t do journalism but rather propaganda.”
Jiménez Enoa and his friends decided to start an independent online magazine — El Estornudo. That name means “Sneeze.” How did they come up with it? They were wracking their brains, trying to think of a name. Then they heard a man in the street selling lemons and honey. “Get some lemons and honey, so you don’t have to sneeze!” In Cuba, people consume lemons and honey when they have a cold. It’s like a home remedy. Jiménez Enoa and his friends thought, “That’s it. A sneeze.”
A sneeze is an involuntary action, or reaction, something the body just does. You can’t control it. If I understand correctly, Jiménez Enoa & Co. thought they could do no other — no other than to speak the truth, as they saw it around them, in an independent journal.
The government blocked it, of course. They made it impossible for Cubans to gain access to it — or almost impossible, because some people used VPNs and other devices to get around the censorship.
The government did a lot worse than block the magazine: They made the lives of Jiménez Enoa and other staffers hell — by arresting them, detaining them, interrogating them, spying on them, carrying out various retaliations against their friends and family.
On one terrible day, state agents seized Jiménez Enoa and stripped him of his clothes. They put handcuffs on him and forced his head between his feet. They filmed him and mocked him. They threatened to imprison him and destroy his family. This went on for hours.
Eventually, they let him go. That night, Jiménez Enoa saw himself on television, as the state further attempted to humiliate him, this time before the whole nation. They called him a “CIA agent.” Today, in Oslo, Jiménez Enoa can joke a little about that. “Where’s my money, from the CIA?”
On July 11, 2021, the country erupted in protests, and the government cracked down, viciously. If dissidence was dangerous and painful before, it was even more so thereafter. The likes of Abraham Jiménez Enoa were under tremendous pressure. The government had been holding Jiménez Enoa’s passport. But, in November, they gave him the ultimatum: We will return your passport — but only if you leave the country, immediately. Otherwise, you’re going to prison.
When he got off the plane, he was amazed. “I landed in Barcelona, capitalism, the Western world.” He had never been in a subway system. He had never had a bank account. “I had the feeling of being born again. It was as if I had landed on Saturn or in another galaxy.” He realized, more than ever, that Cuba was a cruel and abnormal country. It is “an island kidnapped by a political system” that has kept the country in darkness for almost 65 years.
A dictatorship has many ways of keeping a population under control. One of them is: They punish the loved ones of troublemakers. This is maybe the worst punishment a “troublemaker” can suffer. The Cuban dictatorship fired Abraham’s mother, father, and sister from their jobs. A proud revolutionary family was brought low.
Nosy, impertinent, I ask, “Does your family love you still?” Jiménez Enoa says, “I want to think they do.” I want to think that, too.
The Cuban democracy movement, which I have covered for 30 years, is full of Afro-Cubans. Afro-Cubans constitute something like 10 percent of the Cuban population, but they seem to dominate the democracy movement. This is unsurprising, says Jiménez Enoa. “In Cuba, there is structural, or systemic, racism.” There are many fewer opportunities for black Cubans than for white Cubans. “Almost all the people in power are white.”
Fidel Castro died in 2016 at 90. His successor dictator, his brother Raúl, is 92. Unfortunately, the Castro dictatorship bids to outlive the Castros. The Castro brothers installed castrismo, says Jiménez Enoa, and “castrismo is like a machine that has a life of its own at this point.”
Democrats and dissidents are divided on the matter of U.S. policy toward Cuba. Jiménez Enoa is one who thinks that sanctions hurt the general population while leaving the ruling class untouched. “The people in power still have food and electricity. They live life normally.” In principle, Jiménez Enoa is against outside interference in Cuban affairs. At the same time, he favors support of civil-society groups.
Before we part, I say, “Cubans are brave — very brave. Don’t you agree?” He does. He has encountered people who think the opposite, however. He recently talked with a man from Catalonia who said, “You Cubans are not brave, because you have let this dictatorship rule you for all this time, and you have not taken it down.”
Yes, answers Jiménez Enoa. But people have to realize that totalitarianism in Cuba is overwhelming. “They don’t even need to kill a person to take the whole country hostage. They do it through fear. They take away people’s livelihoods. They monitor you, every second. They harass you.” They’ve got the country by the throat.
The Cuban people are indeed brave, says Jiménez Enoa, “because they continue to fight even though sometimes they don’t have water to take a shower.”
Like virtually every Cuban I have ever met, Jiménez Enoa is disgusted by the world’s illusions about his country. It’s a democracy, the illusioned say, with a good and humane government, which has built education, which provides excellent health care, which has gotten rid of racism, etc. This is all nonsense, as Jiménez Enoa says, a pack of lies. “It’s a dictatorship, and the only thing it has done in the last six decades is undermine the spirit of the people.”
It is inspiring to sit with Abraham Jiménez Enoa, a courageous writer, a splendid soul.