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Arnaldo Clavel Carmenaty, who was the director of the newspaper Sierra Maestra —the official organ of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in Santiago de Cuba— for over a decade, died on Friday, April 10, in Havana at the age of 72.
The news was confirmed by the newspaper's own collective on their social media, where they expressed condolences to his wife Bárbara and his daughter Jessica.
Clavel Carmenaty dedicated his entire professional career to the service of the Cuban state press, starting at El Combatiente, the organ of the Eastern Army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), where he served as a proofreader, editor-in-chief, and secretary of the union section.
Subsequently, he joined the Sierra Maestra newspaper, where he served as director from March 1994 to July 2011, a period of 17 years that made him one of the longest-serving directors in the field.
His career was not limited to journalism: he was part of the Provincial Committee of the PCC in Santiago de Cuba and served as president of the Union of Journalists of Cuba (UPEC) in the province, two positions that demonstrate his complete integration into the ideological apparatus of the regime.
The UPEC, founded in 1963, effectively operates as an arm of the Ideological Department of the PCC to control the state press and exclude independent journalism, according to international press freedom organizations.
During his tenure at Sierra Maestra, Clavel also managed the telecenter Tele Turquino before returning to print media. In his later years, he moved to Havana, where he worked at the Cuban News Agency (ACN), another piece of the state's information machinery.
The Sierra Maestra newspaper, founded on September 7, 1957 as a clandestine bulletin of the July 26 Movement, transformed after 1959 into the spokesperson for the regime in the eastern part of the country, publishing content for decades that aligned with the official narrative and censoring inconvenient information.
One of the most illustrative episodes of that propaganda function occurred in September 2025, when the medium published and then removed a note attributing the collapse of the National Electric System in the East to "cowardly and criminal sabotage," after being denied by the Provincial Government of Santiago itself.
The new Cuban Social Communication Law reinforces that information monopoly, recognizing only media linked to the State and the PCC, and penalizing with sentences of six months to three years in prison for content that "subverts the constitutional order."
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