The Cuban regime has sentenced 20 people to terms of up to 20 years in prison for sedition in the eastern province of Holguín. The convictions were released on Monday night (14) by the Justicia 11J collective and are part of the repression of the biggest demonstrations against the dictatorship in decades, which took place in 2021 – which ended with about 800 Cubans.
The group, which lends its name to the day the acts broke out, July 11, also says that among the condemned are five minors aged between 16 and 17. In Cuba, although the age of majority is reached at 18, by the age of 16 young people are already legally responsible for crimes, with sentences that can be reduced.
Two men received the harshest sentences, 20 years in prison, while the teenagers will face punishments of up to 5 years of restriction of certain rights – such as the ban on leaving the province where they live.
When releasing the list of those convicted, Justicia 11J published an audio of William Manuel Leyva Pupo, 20, who received a sentence of 12 years in prison. “What they did to me is not justice,” said the young man.
“Jessica Lisbeth Torres, Miguel Enrique Girón and a third accused were taken [segunda] to arrest without prior notice, even though the sentence ratified the precautionary measure of release on bail for these protesters until after appeal,” the group says of some of those convicted.
The collective has an open petition on its Facebook page in which it demands from the Cuban regime accurate information about detainees, transparency in the legal proceedings brought against them and changes in the country’s legislation so that the right to demonstrate is not criminalized, among others. demands.
On July 21, 2021, a Sunday, thousands of Cubans took to the streets screaming “down with the dictatorship” and “freedom”, dissatisfied with daily power outages, shortages of food and medicine and the way in which the Covid crisis -19 was being treated by the regime. In 2020, the country saw GDP shrink by 11%.
A protest that began in the town of San Antonio de los Baños, a small rural town with 50,000 inhabitants next to Havana, soon spread to several provinces of the country, including the capital.
In a speech broadcast on national television, the country’s leader and first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, accused the United States of being responsible for the acts. “We are calling on all revolutionaries in the country, all communists, to take to the streets where there are efforts to produce these provocations,” he said.
A report by the NGO Human Rights Watch released in October last year indicated that more than 130 Cubans were victims of abuses committed by agents of the dictatorship during the demonstrations that year.
In addition to the arbitrariness of the arrests, the target of Justicia 11J’s claims, the NGO’s survey showed that the forces of repression used torture methods in interrogations.
The document also indicates that the abuses were committed in almost the entire Cuban territory, in 13 of the 15 provinces, and that they were a response to a movement “in its vast majority” peaceful.
The demonstrations sowed dissatisfaction against the regime, which continued with the repression in the face of the challenge of artists and activists to the bans on new acts, which had been scheduled for November last year, but ended up not taking place.
On November 15, the date of the new demonstrations, scheduled to coincide with the first day that tourists could return to visit Cuba, dissidents and organizers were arrested, which ended up deflating and preventing the protests.
