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State Security detains Yoani Sánchez in Havana

The director of the independent newspaper 14ymedio was intercepted on Thursday morning as she left her home in Nuevo Vedado, according to her husband, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, and her own newsroom. Hours later her whereabouts were still unknown.

Yoani Sánchez, director of the independent newspaper 14ymedio, was detained on Thursday at around 9:30 a.m. as she left her home in the Nuevo Vedado neighbourhood, in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución municipality, to shop at the local market. She told colleagues in the newsroom she would be out briefly and, barely ten minutes later, managed to send a four-word message warning of her situation. Her newsroom has had no word from her since.

"She has been detained by State Security," her husband, fellow independent journalist Reinaldo Escobar, said on Facebook, in remarks reported by Cubanet and Martí Noticias. No authority has publicly confirmed the detention or announced any charges against her.

It is the third arrest of an independent journalist in Havana this week. On Monday, Adelth Bonne Gamboa, a contributor to Cubanet, was stopped in the street by police officers who handcuffed him and took him away in a patrol car; he was released hours later with a fine over his social media posts, several pieces of work equipment confiscated and threats of imprisonment. On Tuesday journalist Camila Acosta, also a Cubanet contributor, was detained; after her release she said the authorities disabled her mobile phone and handed her a formal warning for having filmed an officer on October 28 who was preventing her from leaving her home.

The Cuban Observatory of Press and Expression Freedom, part of the Cuban Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Press, says this week's episodes are part of a pattern of harassment against independent journalists, and that the detentions, the threats of criminal proceedings and the confiscation of equipment are intended to restrict the flow of information about conditions in the country.

Since mid-September, independent journalist Henry Constantín, director of La Hora de Cuba, has been held in pretrial detention at the Kilo 7 prison in Camagüey, accused of disobedience.

Several 14ymedio journalists have faced measures of this kind since the paper was founded in May 2014. Reinaldo Escobar has been detained many times and spent years under a travel ban that bars him from leaving Cuba; Luz Escobar was repeatedly confined to her home and harassed in front of her underage daughters, and has lived with asylum in Spain since 2022. Other contributors were jailed: José Gabriel Barrenechea, sentenced to six years in prison in 2024, and Yudiel Hernández, held for three months in 2025 for investigating drug trafficking at a school in Matanzas.

Sources: 14ymedio · Cubanet · Martí Noticias

Data updated: 2026-11-05T16:15:00.000Z

State Security detains Yoani Sánchez in Havana | Yamacoa Observatory