Cuban Christian journalist interrogated for reporting the news
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – A Cuban journalist reporting on abuses against Christianity in Cuba was recently taken in for questioning by authorities, who accused him of being a CIA agent and threatened his mother and two-year-old son.
Yoe Suarez has been reporting on state abuses against human rights since 2014, penning exposes for non-state-controlled media outlets, and received notoriety for reporting on a Christian couple imprisoned by the Cuban government for homeschooling in 2019.
According to Morning Star News, Suarez was taken in for questioning with his mother on April 3rd, where they were interrogated by a Cuban intelligence officer who identified himself as “Captain Jorge” and told the journalist he didn’t yet “know what a dungeon is, or what it is to have a patrol in front of your house.”
“This time they were much less kind than the last,” Suárez said. “He mentioned to me an article of the penal code under which I qualified for the crime of mercenarism.”
The officer then threatened to misrepresent Suarez, who considers writing about human rights to be part of his Christian calling, as a government agent in order to discredit his journalism.
“After that, and in front of my mother, he had no qualms about asking me if I wanted to join DSE as an informant, apparently within [Cuban newspaper] Diario de Cuba,” Suarez related.
One of Suarez’s main areas of reportage has been the Military Units of Aid to the Production (UMAP), a system of concentration camps used by the government to target evangelicals and other dissidents between 1965 and 1968.
Christians in Cuba “face unrelenting pressure from the government,” according to The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), and most of the country’s one million secret believers do not own Bibles.
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