Cuban journalist Abraham Jimenez Enoa, co-founder of the magazine El Estornudo, shares in an interview how persecution in Cuba led him to exile in Barcelona in 2022. He describes the process as dying and being born again, marked by loneliness and depression. Despite his progressive views, he faces discrimination from both sides of the political spectrum.
Abraham Jimenez Enoa entered journalism by chance, initially drawn to sports. As a child, he dreamed of being a baseball player, but lacking talent, he opted to narrate games from his home sofa. He studied journalism to become a sports broadcaster, but discovered his passion for writing upon reading authors of the new North American and Latin American narrative journalism. 'I discovered you could write journalism as if it were literature. That fascinated me,' he explains.
After graduating, he started with sports chronicles, focusing on emigrated and forgotten Cuban athletes, which led him to social and political topics. In 2016, with university friends, he co-founded El Estornudo, a narrative journalism magazine covering daily life and difficult issues in Cuba. His family initially didn't take it seriously, seeing it as play, but everything changed with State Security harassment: interrogations, abductions, and reprisals against relatives, like his mother's firing and his father's forced retirement.
'I never saw it as heroism. I did it out of professional conviction,' Jimenez Enoa says about maintaining his beliefs in an atmosphere of fear. The family pressure, with his sister begging him to stop, was the hardest blow. In 2022, he left Cuba for the first time at age 33, arriving in Europe without a support network. 'It was like dying and being born again. That Abraham who lived in Cuba doesn't exist anymore,' he recounts, describing an identity crisis, depression, and racism in European capitalism.
Exile, while bringing safety, has 'stamped out all my joy,' he says, as he raises his son far from his known world. As a progressive, he faces rejection: the left labels him a 'Yankee' and the right a communist. He recalls an incident in Santiago de Compostela where Spanish political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero insulted him, yelling 'Trump-lover!' and 'Yankee!'. Pessimistic about Cuba's future, he warns that totalitarianism has left deep wounds in the nation, exporting intolerance even to exile. 'We're a destroyed nation and it will be very difficult to rebuild the foundations,' he concludes.