In his natural habitat, Eduardo Ceballos Perez is Eddy Jones. Wearing a hat and vest, he explores the destruction of Havana with a camera and turns each discovery into a story he tells on his satirical channel, Despingovery Channel.

For a little over three months now, his surroundings have changed, although the deterioration has not. Now, far from his loved ones, he is surrounded by bars and guards.

Eddy is being held in pretrial detention awaiting trial before a military court, accused by Cuban authorities of the alleged crimes of espionage and revealing secrets concerning State Security.

It all began after the publication of an episode of Despingovery Channel filmed at a former military installation in Havana, where he showed Soviet missiles, radar equipment, bunkers, and other remnants of decommissioned military hardware.

Before becoming the subject of a criminal case, Eddy had spent half his life turning art into his way of engaging with the world.

Before the Character

To understand who Eddy is, you have to go much further back. In a conversation with elTOQUE, his mother, Marieta Perez, remembers him as a sickly, quiet child who never liked fights or confrontational environments and who, from a very early age, knew clearly that his vocation was art.

“Ever since he was very little, he always said he wanted to be an artist. Before he started school, my mother took care of him and listened to radio soap operas, and he would memorize the introduction to each one. For example, there was a very funny program about Vincent Van Gogh, and he learned it and would act it out from his crib. He was always dramatizing things.”

His entry into the professional world came through the circus, practically by chance. He worked there as a clown and created characters such as Metebulla. He had theatrical training, which, according to Marieta, led him to develop a distinctive style of acting. When he was at one of the high points of that stage of his career, Eddy decided to concentrate on comedy because that was what truly interested him.

“He really liked Hector Zumbado and read his work. He liked that kind of humor. In 2018, he started with the group Pagola La Paga, doing parodies, and that also led him to sing. He always had a great sense of rhythm; he danced and sang.”

After stand-up and other stage experiences came the camera, and with it a new way of turning observation into humor.

For Despingovery Channel, he took nature and exploration documentaries as his inspiration and brought the format to the streets of Havana. Eddy named the project as a play on the popular Discovery Channel and created Eddy Jones, an explorer who traveled through potholes, ruins, abandoned buildings, and forgotten facilities as though he were discovering unknown territories.

The project began as a spontaneous idea and ended up becoming a job. Eddy handled much of the production himself: filming, directing, editing, and photography. He often worked with just one person behind the camera, using a phone and a stabilizer as his main tools. Viewers began sending him locations, photographs, and videos for future expeditions, and the project grew around that community. His mother witnessed the process up close.

“I think the work he was doing with Despingovery was something he was passionate about, first and foremost. And he also prepared everything himself: he created the character and developed various facets of it. He truly lived it with tremendous excitement.”

At every location he had to improvise, find the right words, stay in character, and play with language. Marieta believes he was doing “very, very good work”; several fellow artists had already congratulated him for it.

The project has continued gaining visibility even while Eddy remains in prison. Despingovery Channel currently has around 96,500 followers on Instagram, despite having been inactive for more than three months.

Eddy with his family.

Off camera, Eddy led a much quieter life than his character.

“He has very little free time, but he really enjoys being at home in peace, enjoying his privacy, watching movies, and cooking.”

Marieta describes him as a reserved man who is very close to his family. He lives with his wife, Daniela, and their five-year-old daughter, a girl who admires him and who, according to her grandmother, proudly introduces herself as “the daughter of Despingovery Channel.”

For more than three months, that everyday life has gone on without him.

When the Game Stopped Being a Game

Before his arrest, Eddy had received summonses and warnings from State Security, according to his family. When signs began to emerge that his work could get him into trouble, he did not tell his family very much about it.

“I didn’t know about the situation, which began after an interview he gave to Mario Pentón, until a week later. He didn’t give me many details because he didn’t want me to worry,” Marieta says.

His wife, Daniela Escarra, later said that after he was summoned to a police station, he was told that they could “build a case against him.”

On May 20, 2026, Eddy filmed the episode at the abandoned military facility. He published it on the night of May 24. A few days later, on June 1, he was arrested near his home during a large police operation. According to people close to the family, he was not even allowed to go home to let them know what was happening.

During the first few days, he was investigated by Military Counterintelligence. On June 4, he was sent to pretrial detention at Combinado del Este prison, where he remains. Since then, the family has unsuccessfully requested a change in his pretrial detention status. Marieta was informed of the latest denial on September 1. She also filed a formal complaint, which has likewise been rejected so far. According to the family, the reason continues to be the accusation of a crime against State Security, and the case remains pending before a military court.

More than 100 days after his arrest, the investigation has still not concluded, and the family continues to demand answers and the evidence supporting the accusation.

Marieta says that she, too, never imagined at first how far the situation could go. “You think: they’re going to call him in, they’re going to say something to him, question him, tell him to stop—but not that there would be such a serious, violent, tremendous situation because of filming in a place that is truly abandoned,” she says.

The site Eddy went to explore, his mother explains, was a decommissioned facility with no restrictions on access, unlike the active military area next to it, which did have fences and guards.

Uncertainty has become part of her everyday life, but Marieta tries to face what is happening through acceptance.

“You really think it can’t be true, that this isn’t happening. I have never stopped thinking that this is an exaggeration, that it is illogical, but you also know how things work here: it doesn’t matter that you haven’t done anything that would warrant something like this happening—and yet it is happening,” she says.

Living with the Absence

“You don’t feel the same every day. There are days when I’m a little sadder, a little more emotional, or a little angrier at seeing him dragged into a situation like this. But I don’t see any other way of dealing with it except by facing it,” Marieta says.

For her granddaughter, her father’s absence has had to be translated into language she can understand.

“His daughter is still very little and quite innocent. Sometimes she gets a little sad. But she’s a very cheerful, talkative girl. She misses him and admires him very much, and her mother has told her that her father is at a school teaching other people about his work.”

Daniela, for her part, wrote on Facebook that the girl asks every night when her father will finish at the “little school.” She counts the days until she can see him again and asks why the guards will not allow some of the things the family prepares for him to be brought in. “A five-year-old girl should not have to deal with these kinds of problems,” she wrote.

The rest of the family’s life has also become organized around his absence, Marieta explains.

Eddy with his mother

“We are practically devoting all our time to Eduardo’s affairs—the lawyer, the paperwork, finding things to take to him. Filling a sack, which is what they allow you to bring in for a prisoner, is exhausting. Right now, it is a monumental task.”

The wait is made harder by the limited communication. “His wife gets nervous, frightened, and cries. She starts asking me: Did he call you? Did he call you? The entire family dynamic has been deeply affected. Our lives have been turned upside down dealing with this.”

A Voice from the Cell

Meanwhile, Eddy has been describing his situation from inside. On August 1, his mother made one of his letters public.

“From the place where I am now, confined to a cell, with little food and water, far from my loved ones,” he writes, “I have now been deprived of my freedom for two months and am awaiting trial, accused of committing the crime of espionage against Cuban State Security. It would seem like a joke… but it isn’t.”

Faced with the accusation, Eddy begins by describing himself. “I am an artist, not a spy; a comedian who shows the reality that is there for everyone to see, not a criminal… I am innocent; even so, here I am, trying to rise to the challenge of this battle in which my own life is at stake, aware of the sacrifices my family is making to keep us afloat, but happy to have the affection of thousands of people who support me even though we have never met.”

Without losing hope, he dreams of returning to the streets of his city and to the work he left unfinished:

“I dream of the day when I return home to embrace my loved ones and personally thank everyone for not abandoning us and for giving us the strength to keep resisting. I am indebted to all of you, and I hold on to the hope that we will meet again so I can continue sharing chronicles through the streets of my beloved, potholed and broken Havana,” he said.

The Next Episode

At home, Marieta does not want to get ahead of what might happen. “I ask everyone else to live today, to deal with everyday life and not think about the future, because we really don’t know how we are going to get to that future.”

She prefers to focus on her son as “a young man who has tremendous value as an artist and as a professional, a young man who has been in love with his work and his career, an intelligent, highly analytical, very sociable person who is doing the best he can.”

For now, the family remains in survival mode. The girl counts the days until she can visit her father at the “little school.” The adults prepare the next sack and wait for another phone call.

In his natural habitat, a comedian would sleep at home every night, not in prison. And Eddy dreams of returning to his loved ones and filming the next episode of Despingovery.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.