The personal and painful reality of life under surveillance is documented in an intimate new film that follows an independent Cuban journalist’s flight into exile.
After tough questioning by Cuban police, Abraham Jimenez Enoa relates his ordeal on camera.
He recalls being forced to strip and being handcuffed in a room by five men, and the nausea after being forced into a car and driven around.
Enoa, who was writing columns for The Washington Post from Cuba, said agents accused him of being a CIA agent.
“They said if I published another article in The Washington Post they were going to destroy my family,” he said.
The interview is just one of several harrowing accounts in a hard-hitting documentary filmed secretly by Enoa and his wife Claudia Calvino as they struggled to cope with police surveillance and becoming parents for the first time.
The young family went into exile in Spain in 2022 after Enoa said authorities gave him an ultimatum: leave or he would be jailed.
“Isla Familia,” which will be shown at the Doc New York City film festival between November and December, lifts the lid on the daily pressures faced by independent journalists under the Cuban communist government.
“We just wanted to relate our story. I had no pretensions to make a documentary about life as an independent journalist,” Enoa told VOA. “But often the story of opposition activists or journalists is not told this way.”
Calvino, a film producer, said the documentary was a way for the couple to channel their feelings while under surveillance.
“There was a necessity to channel our emotions more than to give a message. We were just a family living in a house at the time,” she told VOA.
Filmed mostly in Cuba before Enoa was forced into exile, the documentary provides an intimate portrait of the restricted life he led with his wife and their young son, who is now 4, in a cramped flat in Havana.
Harassment in Havana
When Enoa was a child, Cuba’s revolutionary leaders loomed large in his life. His grandfather was a bodyguard to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
In the documentary, he shows the viewer around his grandparents’ home, which is filled with photographs of Castro and Guevara.
But a career in journalism forced Enoa to leave behind his revolutionary family — and roots. In 2016, Enoa founded an independent magazine, El Estornudo (The Sneeze).
The harassment Enoa faced in Havana grew when Enoa took a new role as a columnist for The Washington Post.
In the documentary, Enoa points out the secret police outside his flat who watch his family daily.
He records when huge protests start in 2021 against food and medicine shortages, reporting firsthand on the demonstrators.
He swaps nervous messages with his wife, who worries in case he is arrested.
Initially he is denied a passport, as he is on a list of people under surveillance by the Cuban authorities. It proves to be a pivotal moment.
“I knew this was going to happen, but why does this get to me so much? I don’t want to be in this country anymore,” Enoa says on camera in the documentary.
In response to those protests, Cuba passed a social communication law.
It is the first law to target online media, and it gives the government the power to restrict content that is used to “propagandize in favor of the war of a foreign state hostile to the interests of the nation.”
The Cuban Institute for the Freedom of Expression and Press (ICLEP) says the new media law is another tool for the government to suppress the freedom of the media.
“This is another law of censorship which defends the interest of the Cuban dictatorship,” Normando Hernandez, ICLEP general director, told VOA. “It is a law which maintains the illegality of the independent media and criminalizes the freedom of the press which is not under government control.”
VOA contacted the Cuban Embassy in Madrid and the government’s International Press Center in Havana for a response about the findings by ICLEP. No one responded to either request for comment.
The price of exile
Legal threats and surveillance drive many Cubans into exile.
But as the film “Isla Familia” shows, transitioning to live in a free country with a young family can be a cultural shock.
Negotiating the Barcelona metro appears scary. “How deep is it?” asks Enoa.
Exile carries a cost as he tries to speak to relatives back home on faltering telephone lines and cannot send condolences when his grandmother dies.
His wife can return to Cuba with their son, but Enoa is, in effect, barred.
When Calvino does arrive in Cuba to see family during a temporary visit, she sees her husband’s face on television, where he is once again accused of working for the United States.
Left back in Spain, it is hard for Enoa being away from his family.
“That was the most difficult moment of my life — when I realized the importance of family, and without my wife and my son, I was all on my own,” Enoa told VOA.
Enoa and Calvino have been granted Spanish citizenship and are building a life in Spain. But the journalist knows he cannot return home because of the risk of arrest.
“Of course I miss it terribly,” he said.
