The crackdown on Cuba’s independent press

In 2021, Cuban journalist and opposition activist Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca was arrested on charges of disseminating enemy propaganda and sentenced to five years in prison. He dramatically lost weight after a hunger strike but declined offers by the government to release him if he left the country.

Valle Roca is sixty-three. As his health faded, he listened to the implorations of his family and accepted the offer. Within hours he was on a plane to Miami with his wife, leaving behind their only daughter and two small grandchildren. He now lives in exile.

“My fight was in Cuba for the freedom of the island. I never wanted to leave,” he said in a phone interview from Pennsylvania, where he is currently living with relatives.

For years, he and other reporters had worked on the fringes despite independent journalism being effectively outlawed. There was a brief moment of hope when the Obama administration began engaging with Cuba. But that faded, and was replaced by outright hostility and a ruthless crackdown by the Cuban government on independent media coverage of opposition voices following mass street protests in July 2021.

“Almost all of them were targeted, harassed, or threatened,” said Ted Henken, a professor at the City University of New York who has written extensively about Cuban media.

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