Vladimir Turró Páez, a journalist for CubaNet working from Cuba, reported that he was kidnapped on Thursday by three State Security agents while visiting his mother's house in Havana. He described the experience as ten hours of "extreme terror", which included a gun pointed at his head and a simulation of Russian roulette to force him to publicly renounce independent journalism.
According to his own testimony in a video, the agents arrived at his mother's home around 11 a.m. on November 12 and told him that he had to go with them. They put him in a private vehicle—not a police car—with his head forced down between his feet for the entire journey, which caused him intense back pain.
"We ended up in a mountain. It was a moment of immense terror. Why? Because when we arrived there, one had a phone in hand and the other a gun, and they tried to force me to sign a document renouncing CubaNet," recounted the journalist.
In that remote location, one of the agents pointed a weapon at him while another recorded it on a phone, demanding that he declare his resignation on camera. The armed agent repeatedly removed and reinserted the magazine and pulled the trigger in what Turró described as "a sort of game they call Russian roulette," aimed at psychological breaking.
"The one with the gun was pointing it at me, taking out the magazine where the bullets are, putting it back in, pulling the trigger, and then putting it back again. I don’t know if the magazine had bullets or not, but the reality is that I lived through a lot, a lot of terror," he described.
Despite the pressure, the journalist did not say a single word. "I thought they would end my life. Honestly, that was the truth. It was a tough moment," he admitted. He also pointed out that the three agents were very young—"any of the three could have been my son"—and that they exhibited "so much hatred within them, so much evil" that it was hard to bear.
After the intimidation session, he was taken to the Sixth Police Unit, where an instructor who identified himself as being from Villa Marista —the headquarters of State Security in Havana— presented him with a warning document. The document demanded that he resign from CubaNet and independent journalism under the threat of imprisonment for "usurpation of legal capacity," the term used by the regime to criminalize the exercise of free journalism on the island.
Turró refused to sign and replied to the instructor that "if they did not allow independent journalism, it was because we were in a dictatorship and that the dictatorship does not allow freedoms like this." He was released around nine in the evening.
The episode falls within a documented escalation of repression against journalists from CubaNet during November 2026. Days earlier, journalist Camila Acosta was held for more than eight hours and her phone was destroyed with a corrosive substance; collaborator Adelth Bonne Gamboa was violently detained, had equipment confiscated, and was fined 3,000 pesos. According to the Cuban Observatory of Freedom of Expression of ICLEP, between 2024 and November 2026 there were 124 violations against journalists and collaborators from CubaNet, with 45 occurring just in 2026 and 13 previous incidents specifically attributed to Turró.
"I am truly not going to stop doing my job; I will continue doing journalism, and my only crime will be to be out on the street with a phone and a microphone," the journalist asserted at the conclusion of his testimony.
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