Havana (AFP) – Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez reported this Friday that she had received "threats" and "pressure" from the political police, a day after being detained for several hours in Havana.

First modification: 06/11/2026 - 18:01

"They want me to shut up, they want me to leave (the country)," said this figure of independent journalism in Cuba on the networks, detained on Thursday morning on a street in the capital and released at the beginning of the afternoon.

Opposition activist Berta Soler, 63, leader of the Ladies in White movement, was also detained for several hours on the same day, before being released shortly after. Another member of that group was also briefly detained.

In a video broadcast on YouTube, Sánchez, 51, explained that she was detained by "three men dressed in civilian clothes," members of State Security, who "never" identified themselves. She was then taken to a police station in Cerro, a municipality in central Havana.

The journalist, who founded and directed the digital newspaper 14ymedio since 2014, indicated that she was charged with "several charges," including "propaganda against the constitutional order."

"That obviously has to do with my work," he said.

"They want me to turn off the microphones, but I'm not going to turn them off," she said and stated that this Friday she would resume her journalistic work to "tell" what she saw in the dungeon where she was locked up.

There "I confirmed with horror that dozens or hundreds of Cubans are detained every day in Havana for not having an address for the capital on their identity card." They call them "illegals" and "they deport them to their provinces," he denounced.

Sánchez won the Ortega y Gasset Prize in 2008, one of the main awards in journalism in Spanish, and was included that same year by the American magazine Time among the 100 most influential people in the world.

His newspaper regularly criticizes government management and denounces censorship and harassment by the authorities of opponents and independent journalists.

However, in recent years independent online media have emerged, surviving in a legal vacuum. Cubans access through virtual private networks (VPN).

In the 2026 world ranking of press freedom published by the NGO Reporters Without Borders, Cuba occupies 160th place out of a total of 180 countries.

© 2026 AFP

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