DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
LIDIER HERNÁNDEZ SOTOLONGO

HOST:
ANAELI IBARRA


Synopsis:

A conversation with Lidier Hernández Sotolongo, a Cuban computer engineer living in Uruguay.

Lidier tells us about his personal process of “disenchantment” with the Cuban regime and the consequences of his critical stance towards the island´s political system. After a short stint as a computer engineer at the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), Lidier retired and waited for his permission to migrate.

When this was finally granted, Lidier traveled in 2016 to Uruguay, where he currently resides. He initiated his political activism there as a member of several political organizations, and in 2019 he participated in a civic act in front of the Cuban embassy in Montevideo.

Following a vacation in Havana, Lidier was notified, hours before he was to board his flight back to Uruguay, that he had been “regulated” and could not leave the island. After 8 months of demanding his deregulation, Lidier was finally able to return to Uruguay. The consequences of returning to the island do not appear in any formal document, but Lidier knows the risk of going back.

Bio:

A Cuban citizen residing in Montevideo, Uruguay since 2016. He graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from the Universidad de Cienfuegos (2003 – 2008). His professional career began in Cuba in late 2008 as a computer engineer for the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) in Cienfuegos at 23 years old as a “cadet insert,” having signed, at 18, a sort of “contract” where he committed to staying at the MININT the same number of years it took him to graduate from university. In late 2009, he transferred to the province of Matanazas where, in addition to other personal experiences, access to unlimited internet was vital for him changing his way of thinking ideologically and starting to become what in Cuba is known as “a young person with ideological political problems.” This marked the beginning of his rejection of the MININT, but he was under the threat of the annulment of his university degree if he broke the contract he had signed at 18.

In early 2012 he was finally allowed to leave the MININT, following 8 months of demands and insistence initiated after freeing himself from his fear of requesting leave. He joined the civil workforce in 2012 as a computer technician at the Cruces university campus for one year, and in 2013 he was hired by the municipality of Lajas as a web and web server administrator of the Municipal Department of Education where he remained until leaving Cuba.

In Cuba he had never personally met anyone who identified themselves as opposition to the regime, but when he left the country he continued investigating on social media and consuming more information about the side of Cuban history that no one had taught him. He timidly began to leave behind the fear that paralyzes the majority of Cubans, at first with some Facebook publications, and it was not until January 2019 that he took on the role of activist by participating as one of the organizers of the “Manifestación por Los Prohibidos” in the city of Montevideo.

His activism on social media and his presence at protests as well as in the press and on the radio, both in Uruguay and internationally, seem to have provoked the dictatorship that prohibited his leaving Cuba in February 2020 after a visit home, not without first interrogating and threatening him.

In June 2020 he was again prohibited from leaving, this time while trying to board a humanitarian flight. He was finally able to leave in October 2020 to go back to his country of residence, Uruguay; he is unable to return again to his birth country knowing the consequences that could await him for not ceasing his activism, moreso now with the recently approved penal code.

VIDEO

Banishments: Lidier Hernández Sotolongo

PODCAST