Cuba reduces sentences for some protesters, but crackdown continues, activists warn
After a long struggle to get her son released from jail, Barbara Farrat shed tears of joy when the moment arrived last week.
“We won a battle,” she said in a Facebook video announcing that her son, 18-year-old Jonathan Farrat Torres, who was imprisoned for protesting against the Cuban government last July 11, had been released on bail to await trial.
But she quickly added: “We cannot stop denouncing. Patria y Vida and Freedom, freedom for all our prisoners.”
The Cuban government has reduced the long sentences it had handed down to at least 31 minors and young adults incarcerated after the mass protests last year. Still, family members and activists warn that they have not yet been freed and that authorities continue the trials against the demonstrators and the crackdown on the opposition.
Justicia 11J, a group tracking the trials of the July 11 protesters, reported the release, following appeals, of Farrat and 10 other demonstrators who participated in protests in La Güinera neighborhood in Havana and Santa Clara. The group also recently confirmed the release of another 13 demonstrators.
Salomé García Bacallao, one of the group’s founders, said that another seven who had protested in Havana, including 16year-old Brayan Piloto Pupo and 17-year-olds Kendry Miranda and Rowland Jesús Castillo, were also released. They were initially sentenced to as much as 19 years on charges of sedition.
None were granted outright freedom. Instead, most were sentenced to house arrest or sent to work camps for five years, and many still don’t know what the final sentence will be. Justicia 11J says that their release might be temporary, until the court orders them to start serving their sentences, or could be quickly reversed.
That’s exactly what the family of Andy García Lorenzo endured. His sentence was commuted from four years in prison to a similar time in a work camp. But they understood he would be allowed to return home from the camp.
Yet, after he gave an interview to the independent outlet Cubanet and posted a video asking for the release of all political prisoners, he was detained by police and sent straight to the work camp, his sister, Roxana García Lorenzo, said.
Among those released was Brandon David Becerra Curbelo, who was 17 when he was detained last July. His sentence was reduced from 13 years in prison to five years under house arrest.
His mother, Yanaisy Curbelo, cried when she learned the news, but she now says her son has been deeply affected by his experience in prison. She says he doesn’t want to go out of the house and asks for permission to do the simplest things, like grabbing water from the refrigerator or going to the bathroom.
“My son sits like this, with a blank mind,” she told the Miami Herald.
FEW BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT IS TAKING A MORE LENIENT APPROACH AGAINST THE OPPOSITION. JUSTICIA 11J SAYS MORE THAN 700 DEMONSTRATORS ARE STILL DETAINED.
“He looks in the mirror and tells me, ‘Mom, it’s me.’ He eats too much; he sleeps a lot because he feels exhausted. This really affected him and me, too. It seems incredible to me that he is in the house. This has been hard, traumatic.”
Jonathan Farrat’s mother tells a similar story.
“He is too quiet,” Barbara Farrat said in an interview. “He was always a talkative boy, but not now. He spends practically the whole day with his phone and hardly speaks. These boys were taken out of there traumatized.”
Jonathan’s girlfriend had a baby in October when he was in jail. Images of Jonathan, taken by his mother, show him holding his baby, but he avoided the camera. She says there is much of her son’s life in jail that she doesn’t know.
“He was beaten in the police unit when he was arrested” last August, she said. “The only thing I have been able to find out is that five guards in prison once beat him.”
She plans to take him to see a cardiologist because he has a heart problem due to high blood pressure. He was refused treatment for three months while detained, his mother said.
She was relentless in fighting his imprisonment and said she would not stop advocating for the other political prisoners. “I only want that the harassment [from state security agents] would stop,” she said.
Yanaisy Curbelo believes the teenagers released were the ones whose mothers were the most vocal.
“There are many mothers who were afraid; they didn’t want to do anything,” she said.
Now she is concerned about what could happen to her son.
“He has to be on his best behavior, or the house arrest sentence could be revoked at the slightest thing,” she said.
The releases came after the Biden administration announced some changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba and the lifting of restrictions on flights and remittances. García Bacallao believes Cuban authorities might also be responding to a critical report by the United Nations Committee on Torture about their handling of the protests and an ongoing review by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child.
But few believe the government is taking a more lenient approach against the opposition. Justicia 11J says more than 700 demonstrators are still detained. And the trial of artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo went on this week despite calls by several governments and international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International for the Cuban government to release them.
Otero Alcántara, named a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International and one of the 100 most influential people in 2021 by Time Magazine, faces a seven-year sentence under charges of public disorder, contempt and “insulting national symbols” for his use of the Cuban flag in a performance.
He and Castillo were also detained on July 11 last year.
In January, the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Castillo had been arbitrarily detained and asked the Cuban government to release him immediately.
Castillo, a Grammy Awards winner as one of the authors of the protest anthem Patria y Vida, faces a 10-year sentence.
The trial took place Monday and Tuesday under heavy police and state security presence, said one of the defense witnesses, Cuban visual artist Julio Llópiz-Casal.
“It was very intimidating,” he said.
Cuban authorities did not allow foreign diplomats nor reporters from independent outlets or foreign media to attend.
Little is known about what was said in the trial. Llópiz-Casal said he was allowed in only briefly to testify and then escorted out. He said the room was filled with members of Cuba’s Interior Ministry.
Hundreds of miles away from the trial, in Santa Clara, Cuban activist Saily González was captured on video while she was forcibly detained while wearing a T-shirt with the faces of Otero Alcántara and Castillo and the message “Free Maykel Osorbo, free Luis Manuel.”
“You know you can’t do that,” a young man wearing a Nike T-shirt and aviator glasses tells her while grabbing her by her neck. “Give me your phone.”
The attack was caught on camera because González was live-streaming her protest walk on Facebook. She was released several hours later after family members brought her another T-shirt at the police station.