The independent journalist Camila Acosta was arrested this Tuesday in Havana while walking to a veterinary appointment with her cat, as reported by the media CubaNet, for which she works as a reporter.
State Security agents intercepted her at the corner of her home, in the Plaza de la Revolución municipality, handcuffed her, and forcibly took her into a police patrol. The pet was left abandoned in the public street until a neighbor rescued it and alerted the journalist's husband, the writer and former political prisoner Ángel Santiesteban.
"She was taken away handcuffed and violently shoved into the patrol car," Santiesteban recounted to CubaNet. By the time this report was published, Acosta's whereabouts and the formal charges against her were unknown.
The neighbors who witnessed the arrest attempted to intervene with the officers, arguing that Camila was a decent person. The police's response, according to Santiesteban, was that "because of her, they had beaten a relative of a revolutionary."
The arrest occurs a day after the violent detention of the communicator Adelth Bonne Gamboa, also a contributor to CubaNet, in the Havana neighborhood of Santos Suárez.
Bonne was released hours later, but his laptop, phone, camera, tripods, headphones, and microphone were confiscated, and he was fined 3,000 pesos under the , the regulation that the regime uses to sanction journalists who disseminate information on digital platforms.
CubaNet denounced both arrests as part of a coordinated repressive escalation: "The repression against CubaNet journalists aims to prevent awareness of what is happening in Cuba. We demand an end to arbitrary detentions, threats, and harassment against independent media."
The detention on Tuesday is not an isolated incident, but rather the latest link in a systematic pattern of harassment. Just on October 28, a plainclothes agent prevented her from leaving her home in Vedado without showing a court order or identifying himself, an episode that Acosta herself recorded and shared. The Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press (ICLEP) documented similar encirclements in August and September of 2026.
Among the most serious of his background is the detention on April 21, 2024, in Cárdenas, Matanzas, while he was on his way to visit the families of political prisoners, ordered by State Security.
The most emblematic case occurred on July 12, 2021, a day after Acosta covered the protests of 11J for CubaNet and the Spanish newspaper ABC. She was arrested and spent over ten months under house arrest, according to documentation by the Committee to Protect Journalists, which interviewed her following her release.
The journalist declared in 2022 that she had been detained approximately twenty times throughout her career. Her latest arrest occurs in a context of increasing repression: the ICLEP recorded 272 violations of freedom of expression and the press just in July 2026, the highest monthly figure documented, while Cubalex counted 677 political prisoners in Cuba as of November 2, 2026.
Related videos:
Filed under: