The Danger of Thinking and Loving: Yndamiro Restano and the Birth of Independent Journalism in Cuba

El Yuma with Yndamiro Restano, June 30, 2023, Miami.
Photo by Amparo López Pujol

"La prensa independiente sirve para sacar a la luz lo que las ideologías ocultan.” -Yndamiro Restano – October 31, 2022

The humble beginnings of Cuba’s now surging, decidedly digital, and transnational movement of independent journalism date to an otherwise unexceptional April morning in 1985. 

That day, a 36-year-old reporter with Radio Rebelde named Rolando Yndamiro Restano Díaz who covered the agricultural beat for the renowned station (first established by Carlos Franqui as the clandestine arm of the July 26th Movement in the late 1950s) took out his trusty Underwood typewriter and produced what would become the island’s first independent newspaper. It was a handmade broadsheet just a single-page in length emblazoned with the heading, Nueva Cuba. 

Restano – who died in exile in Miami earlier this year where I met and interviewed him in June 2023 - normally used Yndamiro as his first name. That April morning, Yndamiro laboriously typed out 50 identical copies of the missive and distributed them up and down the streets of his Vedado neighborhood in Havana with one ending up pinned to a wall in the famed Coppelia ice cream parlor at the crest of the La Rampa shopping district in the heart of the Vedado business district. 

At this early stage, however, Yndamiro had no intention of criticizing Fidel Castro’s government itself, starting a dissident movement, or much less calling for wholesale regime change. Instead, he sought to share what he considered vital information about the disturbing realities of Cuba’s wasteful and woefully inefficient state farms systematically censored by the official press and hidden from view by the powerful bureaucrats who oversaw such farms. 

Believing that access to such information was not only a public right but also an essential antidote to the many bureaucratic errors (or worse) committed in secret, Yndamiro thought that the light of day and the exposure to public opinion might help remedy such abuses. As a journalist, he also believed that it was his professional duty to report on these issues. 

Much like what life-long journalist Reinaldo Escobar would also attempt to do from the pages of Juventud Rebelde in the coming years (1987-1988) before being unceremoniously sacked himself, Yndamiro was animated by the hope of producing what he thought of as a truly “revolutionary” form of journalism that would expose what was not working in Cuba’s socialist system so that it could be “rectified.” Also, like Reinaldo, at this stage Yndamiro thought that Cuba’s problems arose from an incorrect application of the doctrine of state socialism and not from an inherent, fatal flaw in the system itself. 

Finally, he shared Reinaldo's ultimately dashed hope that a Cuban-style “rectification of errors” (declared as state policy by Fidel Castro in 1986) would emulate the policies of glasnost and perestroika then gaining steam in the Soviet Union instead of closing ranks and guarding against them – as turned out to the be the case. 

In other words, Yndamiro did not set out to become a political dissident in his valiant if quixotic launch of Nueva Cuba but an independent journalist. His aim was not only to break away from the propagandistic straight-jacket of the official media but also to avoid any blanket condemnation of the Revolution to which he and at least three generations of his family had dedicated their lives. 

But in this he turned out to be sorely mistaken and more than a little naïve. Indeed, instead of provoking a critical and corrective investigation of the mismanagement of state farms, Yndamiro’s unauthorized circulation of his mimeographed broadsheet – outside the strictly controlled official media system – unleashed the full force of Cuban state security against him. 

However, Yndamiro was not content to publish his independent journalism abroad in German or English translation (as Reinaldo was beginning to do at this time). Indeed, his insistence on self-publishing his exposé and having it circulate within the island for a Cuban audience forced him to quickly face the fact that in the eyes of the island’s Gestapo-like security enforcers independent journalists and political dissidents are one and the same. 

This same lesson would be hard-learned by all future generations of “renegade” journalists who dared to break out of the official state media monopoly and launch their own independent journalism projects.

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The above narrative of Yndamiro Restano’s personal background and activities as a pioneering Cuban independent journalist forms the introductory section of a full chapter I have written about Yndamiro's essential contribution to kickstarting the rebirth of the free press in Cuba between the 1985 self-publication of Nueva Cuba and his 1995 exile (a trajectory interrupted by the three-and-a half years he spent in jail in Cuba as a political prisoner as punishment for his independent "thinking and loving"). 

The chapter is part of a larger book I am working on about the independent journalism movement in Cuba over the past half-century and is based on various interviews I conducted with Yndamiro by telephone and in person between 2021 and 2023. I thank Amparo López Pujol for her help in facilitating those interviews and for providing me with other background information on Yndamiro's impactful life and career. 

If you want to learn more about Yndamiro and can't wait for the publication of my book (!), key sources that have proven vital in my reconstruction of this all-important decade in Restano’s political and professional trajectory (1985-1995) include Reina (1995), Bilello (1997), Mari (2006), García (2017), and especially Beaulieu (2014). Restano’s own “Testimony of an Independent Journalist,” originally published in El Nuevo Herald in May 1996 and later included in the book Desde Cuba con valor (Editorial Pliegos, 1997), has also proven very useful.