The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) approved a report this Sunday during its 82nd General Assembly held in Bogotá, which denounces “persistent patterns and new forms of restriction on freedom of expression” in Cuba, with particular emphasis on the use of police and courts as tools of repression against journalists, content creators, and activists.
The document indicates that these practices have resulted in "an increase in arrests, summonses, interrogations, and judicial proceedings, further deepening the restrictions on the exercise of freedom of expression and the press."
The case that the SIP qualifies as of "greatest seriousness" is that of journalist Henry Constantín, director of La Hora de Cuba and regional vice president for Cuba of the organization's own Commission on Freedom of the Press and Information.
Constantín was arrested in September in Camagüey and transferred to the Kilo 7 maximum security prison, where he remains in provisional detention. Cuban authorities have charged him with the offense of "disobedience" for arriving late to a summons from State Security, after the agents had already left.
The Provincial People's Tribunal of Camagüey rejected the habeas corpus petition filed on his behalf. In mid-October, prison officials claimed to have found a knife among his belongings during a search—an assertion that Constantín denied, attributing it to a setup—which resulted in his transfer to a punishment cell and the suspension of visits and phone calls. Both Reporters Without Borders and the U.S. Department of State demanded his immediate release at the end of September.
The report also documents the case of Kamil Zayas and Ernesto Ricardo Medina, founders of the audiovisual project El4tico (El Cuartico), who have been imprisoned since February for satirical videos and political analysis.
The Provincial Prosecutor's Office of Holguín requested 10 years in prison for Zayas and eight for Medina, accused of "propaganda against the constitutional order" and "incitement to commit a crime" in a context that the SIP describes as the "criminalization" of opinion spaces on social media.
The organization also summons content creator Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente—known as Anna Bensi—age 21, and her mother, Caridad Silvente, sentenced on October 1 to two years of "restriction of freedom" for recording and distributing a video of a sub-officer from the Ministry of the Interior who arrived at their home to deliver a summons.
The report also mentions journalists Jorge Bello and José Gabriel Barrenechea, who are imprisoned for participating in protests, and Mayelín Rodríguez Prado, who is serving a 15-year sentence for having streamed a demonstration on Facebook in Camagüey in 2022.
Among the structural restrictions, the SIP emphasizes the Decree 160, in effect since August 2026, which eliminates the possibility for independent media to formalize as private economic activities and keeps journalism, news agencies, broadcasting, and publishing under state control.
The organization also denounces the category of "regulated" journalists—those banned from leaving the country—calling it an "additional mechanism of pressure and control," along with internet outages, paper shortages, and verbal summonses that "often serve as a prelude to arrests and criminal proceedings."
This scenario is framed within a 129% increase in repression against independent journalists in September compared to August, according to the Cuban Observatory for Freedom of Expression, which recorded 39 violations of press freedom in September, up from 17 in August.
The SIP, founded in 1943 and based in Miami, brings together more than 1,300 publications from the Western Hemisphere and is the main hemispheric forum for evaluating press freedom.
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