After Jan. 15, social networks in Cuba were filled with the hashtag #Todos after the Cuban government reported that it would release 553 people as a result of its negotiations with the Vatican and the United States. The trending word became a demand for the freedom of all political prisoners on the island.
Joining this call, on Jan. 21, an alliance of 10 independent Cuban media outlets launched #Todos, a platform based in data journalism that monitors the releases.
“The idea was to be able to check through the data if, in fact, the government would release those 553 people and under what conditions,” José Nieves, director of El Toque, one of the media outlets, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
In a country where privately owned media are prohibited and information is strictly controlled, doing this kind of data journalism project is especially challenging. The media alliance largely relied on records from civil society organizations to get the job done.
Laritza Diversent, lawyer and executive director of one of these organizations, Cubalex, explained to LJR that having complete records is difficult because there is no official data and not all people in prison have the support of family members or others who make their complaints public.
Even so, the media have documented 192 people who have been released so far. That’s out of 1,391 political prisoners in Cuba, a figure that civil society organizations say is under-reported.
“I want to highlight that everything was done in five days and although it is very simple, it was finished with a lot of dignity and the quality is good,” Nieves said.
Media that participated in the project include 14ymedio, Alas Tensas, Árbol Invertido, CiberCuba, El Estornudo, El Toque, Havana Times, La Hora de Cuba, Periodismo de Barrio and Rialta.
The platform shows faces of those released, alongside their release date and other personal data.
It also features graphics that explain the media outlets’ findings after analyzing a database built for the project.
“State propaganda began to use the term release, but with the data we were able to confirm that people do not leave prison as free [people] because they are released on conditional release or extra-penal license (medical reasons),” Nieves said.
Other findings are that the majority of those detained were caught up in the 2021 anti-government protests. Also known as the July 11 demonstrations, this is when thousands of Cubans took to the streets for the first time in decades demanding a change in their living conditions and protesting against the authoritarianism of the Cuban government.
In addition, a large part of those released had served more than half of their sentence and there is a frequency of the use of crimes such as desacato, disobedience, sabotage and sedition to prosecute opponents.
The page also has a form so that citizens can help identify released people who do not appear in the records.
The main sources for the creation of this platform were the records on political prisoners from the civil society organizations Cubalex, Prisoners Defenders, Justicia 11J and the Cuban Human Rights Observatory.
Some of the organizations provided media in the alliance with data in CSV formats. In other cases, the media outlets extracted the information by scraping web pages, Abraham Calas, programmer at El Toque, told LJR
However, the data collection system was different at each civil society organization.
“Consolidation represented the first challenge. We had to group all those tables, remove duplicates and try to unify all that information,” Calas said.
The journalists participating in the project cleaned the data manually and had to confirm each of the names, checking their ages, and making sure that the crimes corresponded to the political prisoners.
Therefore, the prisoner database check was done on two levels. First, each civil society organization internally determined whether the person was detained for their political ideas or in the context of a demonstration. Secondly, the media verified the information.
“There was a case of two people who had practically identical names and it turned out that they were twin sisters. It was not the same name, rather their names only had one different letter,” Nieves said. “For those types of things we double-checked the information we had.”
The final database of 1,391 political prisoners contains names, ages, detention scenarios, types of criminal charges, sentences, times served and times to be served. This database is not available on the platform for security reasons, Calas said.
Then, through the journalists' reporting, it was confirmed who in that database was being released.
Since Donald Trump assumed his second term as president of the United States on Jan. 20, the releases have stopped without explanation from the Cuban government. Human rights organizations in Cuba attribute this to the president's decision to once again include the island on the list of sponsors of terrorism.
It is not the first time that independent Cuban media have come together for a project. On other occasions, some of these media have joined in public statements to denounce repression or the lack of civic rights in Cuba. But, in general, it is not common.
“Collaborations between independent Cuban media is overdue, and would be a sign of maturity of the public sphere that we share,” Jesús Adonis Martínez, editor at the media outlets El Estornudo and Rialta, told LJR.
There was no support from external funds to carry out this project. Each media outlet and organization contributed their time, resources and knowledge to move the platform forward.
Collaboration between the media and civil society organizations has also been key to bringing #Todos to life.
“This collaboration benefits us in many aspects. The media has much more reach than some civil society organizations may have,” Diversent said. "In addition, this way we can document and keep Cuban society informed because we know that the State manipulates information and misinforms as well."
