Cuba: exemplary sentences for demonstrators of July 11

The General Prosecutor’s office recognized that 790 Cubans, including 55 minors, were charged for “vandalism”, “attacks on state authority” and “serious alterations of public order”

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This is a new mass trial held in Havana between Monday, January 31 and Thursday, February 3rd. For four days, thirty-three Cubans were judged for “sedition” by the district court 10-October. They are accused of participating in violent acts – stone and bottles and damaged police car – during the demonstrations that shook the island on July 11, 2021. That day, thousands of people are spontaneously. In the streets of about fifty cities to the cry of “we are hungry” and “down the dictatorship”. The parquet floor required up to twenty-five years in prison.

The previous week, the accused for “sedition” were thirty-nine. And mid-January, they were fifty-seven. Since the month of December 2021, not a week is happening without trials against protesters take place in Cuba. So much so that the regime of Miguel Diaz-Canel, who had recognized a death and dozens of wounded among the protesters of July 11, but had never quantified the number of detentions, did not finally have any other choice. than to lift the veil on the magnitude of the repression that has fallen on the Caribbean island, where trials are not public.

On January 25, in a statement published in the Granma newspaper, the General Prosecutor’s Office admitted that 790 Cubans, including 55 minors aged 15 to 18, were charged for “vandalism”, “attacks on the State authority “and” serious alterations of public order “as a result of the most massive events ever recorded on the island since 1959. Ten minors under 16 years old – age from which applies the responsibility Criminal – have also been interned in “integral and driving schools”.

“Simulacre of Justice”

For NGOs, there is no doubt that the Cuban regime wants the sentences to serve as an example and prevent any new uprising in the country, while anger shines on the bottom of food and medicine shortages.

“Since the Revolution, there was no such wave of mass trial,” said Javier Larrondo, the president of the Prisoners Defenders Association, based in Madrid, with reference to the television trials of hundreds of officials From the regime of Batista after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. “The regime, he adds, wants to create a real climate of terror with a simulacrum of justice: lawyers are not independent, the police officers take care of of the instruction, the witnesses are agents. “At these trials were added, on January 28, the first evidence, on state television, mothers of protesters asking, between sobs,” sorry to the country “.

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/Media reports.