At 22 years old, Mayelín Rodríguez Prado received the largest sentence with which the Cuban Government punished a group of 13 people who demonstrated in August 2022 in the municipality of Nuevitas, in the center of the Island. Prado, who is mother of a little girl, will pay 15 years in prison for being the one who broadcast the protests through the social network Facebook.
Known as ‘La Chamaca’, Prado recorded the moment when the Cuban police beat three girls during the demonstration and other repressive scenes against the participants of the revolt. The young woman, whose daughter at the time was less than a year old, was arrested at her house after the protest and held incommunicado at a State Security headquarters.
The judicial ruling recently handed down by the Municipal Court of Camagüey, to which the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) had access, details that the Court agreed to sanction Prado as “the author of an intentional and consummated crime of enemy propaganda of a continuous nature.” ” and “author of an intentional and completed crime of sedition.” They also announced sentences of between 4 and 14 years to 12 other participants in the demonstration for the same crimes. According to the Cuban Penal Code, sedition is a “crime against the internal security of the State,” and anyone who “in tumultuarily and through express or tacit concert, using violence, disturbs the socialist order” is condemned.
“Mayelín was the one who gave visibility to the protests and the repression of the authorities, that is why this sentence is a way of punishing her,” says Cuban lawyer Raudiel Peña Barrios, a member of the legal advisory group Cubalex. The lawyer insists that the objective of these high sentences is to criminalize peaceful protest and freedom of expression. “The message is clear. Any person who protests, no matter how peaceful, anywhere in Cuba, will be sanctioned. The crime of sedition has a very political content, because sedition has to be committed by someone who wants to change the political regime. The message is to convey that any person, who does not even participate in the demonstration but who records them, takes photos or videos, will also be sanctioned.”
Tired of the lack of electricity and other basic needs, hundreds of Nuevitas residents went out two years ago with pots and pans, their cell phone flashlights and horns on the streets of the Pastelillo neighborhood shouting for “Freedom.” This demonstration took place just one year after the massive protests of July 11, which the Government of Havana dissolved with repression and sentences that left more than a thousand people behind bars, some paying up to 30 years in prison.
“Exemplary sentences”
The Cuban activist Marcel Valdes made public in
These sentences “seek to be exemplary” in the midst of the discontent caused by the socioeconomic situation in the country, according to Yaxys Cires, director of strategies at the OCDH. “These sentences are part of a highly repressive context like the current one, in which other events have also occurred: the detention of journalist José Luis Tan since last Friday, April 26; the arbitrary detention for several hours of the intellectual Alina Bárbara López Hernández, who was also beaten; and the recent reminder on a Cuban television program that there are crimes, such as sedition, that could carry the death penalty. “These are some examples,” he says.
The United States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Brian A. Nichols, also criticized the sentences of the protesters. “The harsh sentence this week of up to 15 years in prison for Cubans who peacefully gathered in Nuevitas in 2022 is outrageous,” he said on basic needs is inconceivable.”
There are other cases of people that the Government has sentenced for expressing themselves publicly on social networks. Among the protesters in July 2021, Yoan de la Cruz, who broadcast the first demonstration from San Antonio de los Baños live on Facebook, was imprisoned for 10 months and sentenced to five years of correctional work without internment.
With the rise of the Internet in recent years on the Island, the access of more and more Cubans to the Internet and the displays of popular disobedience in recent times, the Government has implemented tools that restrict freedom of expression in these spaces and sanction with the Law any publication considered a threat. Decree Law 370, approved in 2019, makes it a crime to disseminate “information contrary to public interest, morality, good customs and the integrity of people” on social networks. Likewise, Decree Law 35 of 2021 legislates the restriction of the use of information “through telecommunications/ICT infrastructures, platforms or services, of content that violates the constitutional, social and economic precepts of the State.”
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