An extensive report published Thursday by the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders documented in detail the abuse of Cuban political prisoners following the nationwide protests on July 11, 2021, including torture and arbitrary detention of children, infirm seniors, and persons with documented mental illness.
Prisoners Defenders, a Spanish human rights organization, has documented more than 1,000 cases of individuals imprisoned in Cuba, a repressive communist state for over half a century, because of their perceived or expressed political beliefs. Attempts by human rights groups to tally the true number of such political prisoners necessarily fall short of counting them all, as the Cuban Communist Party actively obstructs human rights investigations and persecutes researchers and journalists, so the true number of political prisoners on the island is likely far higher.
Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders, debuted the nearly two-year investigation into the fates of Cubans arrested following the July 11 protests in an event on Thursday. Prisoners Defenders has filed a formal complaint with the United Nations against the Republic of Cuba, demanding the immediate freedom of the imprisoned, detailing the process that led to their imprisonment – sometimes without receiving a trial or sentence – and finding no evidence of anything resembling due process or respect for the rule of law.
Cuba is a member of the U.N. Human Rights Council.
During the event on Thursday, Larrondo noted that, prior to July 11, 2021, his organization had documented less than 200 political prisoners imprisoned on the island, “usually independent journalists, dissident intellectuals and human rights activists.”
“In addition, more than 11,000 people in Cuba were condemned under ‘pre-criminal’ provisions,” meaning Cuba imprisoned them out of suspicion that they may, in the future, commit a crime due to behavior “contrary to the morality of the Revolution.”
“Hundreds of thousands of youths have spent time in prison for pre-criminal behavior,” he noted.
The July 11 protests attracted an estimated 187,000 people in nearly every municipality in Cuba. Cubans took to the streets shouting “freedom,” “fatherland and life” [a play on the communist slogan “fatherland or death”], and anti-Castro slogans. Protesters were overwhelmingly peaceful, yet, in response, figurehead “President” Miguel Díaz-Canel appeared on television and issued an “order of combat,” demanding that civilians sympathetic to communism take to the streets and physically assault suspected protesters. As the Prisoners Defenders complaint details, the Castro regime – still dominated by officially former dictator Raúl Castro and his successors – “deployed busloads of individuals summoned by the various organizations of the Communist Party” to beat suspected protesters with sticks and baseball bats:
The aftermath of the protests and subsequent repression continues to this day, as hundreds of prisoners face charges ranging from the most severe – “sedition” – to bizarre communist legal constructs such as “disrespect,” a crime in the Cuban penal code. In the presentation on Thursday, Larrondo noted that the Castro regime has sentenced multiple children on charges of “sedition” with no significant evidence against the children. According to UNICEF, as many as 150 children under the age of 15 are currently imprisoned in Cuba, Larrondo noted.
In addition to sedition and “disrespect,” the cases analyzed by Prisoners Defenders include civilians charged with crimes such as “public disorder,” assault, resistance to police, “pre-criminal social dangerousness,” and “instigation to delinquency.” Some faced criminal charges of “propagation of an epidemic,” accused of spreading Chinese coronavirus disease by violating social distancing guidelines with their presence in public.
The in-depth analysis of 300 individuals arrested following the July 11 protests indicated a total lack of due process. The complaint to the U.N. noted that an independent body of criminal defense attorneys simply does not exist in Cuba, making a true legal defense impossible. The judicial system itself appeared to be, in many cases, absent from the criminal process – the arrested were processed in military courts or accused by the police. In some cases, “no judge was even informed of the arrests carried out by police” in the immediate aftermath of their detention.
“Deprivation of liberty for periods of more than 48 hours and in many cases for more than a year without the presence or knowledge of any court and without independent legal defense has occurred in all the cases presented in this complaint,” the document reads.
The individual cases analyzed indicate the use of torture and other forms of abuse against civilians with minimal, often no, evidence of having violated the law. In the case of 66-year-old Pedro Albert Sánchez, for example, police issued “provisional detention” without a judge being involved in the process at all. Sánchez faced interrogation without an attorney present, not even a regime-approved “defense” lawyer. Sánchez faced these abuses despite having been diagnosed with prostate cancer and ulcerative colitis, for which he received no medical attention while in police custody.
In another case of abuse, Jonathan Torres Farrat was arrested on July 11 while celebrating his seventeenth birthday. Torres and his family deny that they participated in the protest at all, but Torres has been behind bars since August 13, 2021, and remains there. Police reportedly showed Torres a video of the protests and claimed that one of the men on the screen was him; he denied that he was there but was, nonetheless, charged with assault and public disorder. According to Prisoners Defenders, no arrest warrant was issued for his detention.
“The victim denounces that he was shackled and hung by a rail and that, every time he moved, the shackles tightened, pressuring his wrists,” Prisoners Defenders details. Torres also said he was tortured by being forced to stay in uncomfortable positions for long stretches of time and tossed naked into a freezing cell. The torture resulted in police having to send him to a juvenile hospital.
Another harrowing case detailed is that of Walnier Luis Aguilar Rivera, sentenced to 23 years in prison for “sedition” despite having an extensive record of mental illness. Aguilar is currently imprisoned in one of the island’s most notorious facilities, the Combinado del Este jail. The sedition charge was based on allegations that Aguilar had publically used “phrases against the Revolution,” such as “freedom,” “down with Fidel,” and “down with the dictatorship.”
The court processing Aguilar’s case denied the admission of evidence that he had been diagnosed with “anxiety, aggression, insecurity… and suffers from “multifactoral mental retardation.” Aguilar’s mental illness was severe enough for the Castro regime to exempt him from mandatory military service but not enough to be admitted as evidence in his defense against charges of sedition.
In yet another case, that of Ciro Ernesto Lamorruz Soto, the court did not allow evidence that Lamorruz did not in any way participate in the protests. Lamorruz was in public in Havana with his girlfriend, the then 17-year-old Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, who was arrested and sentenced to eight months of house arrest after her case became an international outrage. Hernández later said in an interview that, despite being legally a child, Cuban prisoner guards molested her during a search and threatened to rape her while in their custody:
Lamorruz has been in prison since July 22, 2021.
The abhorrent treatment of dissidents and suspected dissidents has not suppressed Cubans’ demand for freedom. A study published in January found that Cubans organized nearly 4,000 protests throughout 2022, long after the crackdown in July 2021 and despite ongoing violence against those who take to the streets. The situation has apparently shaken confidence in Díaz-Canel, as 91-year-old Raúl Castro announced in February that he would end his retirement and run for an uncompetitive seat in the nation’s legislature.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.