Cuba crackdown: Harsh sentences for protesters, relatives of political prisoners
In another example of a ruthless campaign to crush dissent, Cuban authorities sentenced the wife of a Cuban political prisoner to 14 years in prison for charges of acting against state security, for which she had been previously acquitted due to lack of evidence.
Fifteen Cubans were also given sentences as high as 15 years for joining protests calling for food and electricity in March 2024 in the city of Bayamo.
A court in Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second-largest city, sentenced Ana Ibis Tristá Padilla, 36, to 14 years in prison for the crimes of “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “other acts against state security.” In the same case, Jarold Varona Aguero was sentenced to 12 years in prison, also accused of acts against state security, according to court documents of the case reviewed by the Miami Herald.
That same court, which handles only cases involving crimes against state security, had acquitted both due to a lack of evidence in a decision last November. But Cuba’s Supreme Court annulled the acquittals in May and ordered new trials after the government prosecutor in the case complained about the decision, according to the documents.
In a January letter, the prosecutor, Adán Vicente Santos Santos, claimed that the local court wrongly dismissed testimony of two counterintelligence officers from the Interior Ministry who accused Tristá Padilla of inciting two other men to publish antigovernment content on Facebook. The prosecutor also questioned the court for dismissing accusations that Tristá Padilla had been in contact with “extremists terrorists influencers” and clandestine counterrevolutionary groups. They also accused her and Varona Aguero of following the groups’ instructions and agreeing to carry out an attack on an Interior Ministry in Las Tunas, a province in eastern Cuba.
The attack never happened, and during the first trial, the court stated that there was no evidence to support the accusations.
Judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys all work for the Cuban government and rarely question accusations made by state security officials. But in an unusually open fashion, the court originally wrote that “there is no conclusive evidence to show that they carried out acts intended to organize or form part of armed groups to commit any of the crimes against state security.” The court also noted in its first sentence that the Interior Ministry agents did not seize substances or any other material evidence that could be linked to terrorist acts, and did not gather intelligence to support the accusations.
The court also dismissed information provided by the agents about Tristá Padilla’s alleged links to the influencers and the clandestine groups as “unable to prove” the accusation. It also acquitted her of charge of spreading propaganda against the state because the only evidence cited by the agents to show that she “incited” the two men to make the antigovernment publication on Facebook was that she met with them at a bar the following day.
In the second trial, however, the same court cited all the accusations as “proven facts” — even though no new evidence was cited in the documents.
“Yet another case that demonstrates how the regime uses justice as a tool of punishment against those who speak out for freedom,” said the U.S. -based Cuban American National Foundation.
After Havana passed several laws criminalizing the use of social media to criticize Cuban authorities, it has become even more dangerous for Cubans to share content deemed “counterrevolutionary.”
The Santiago de Cuba court also sent the other two men in the same case, who made the Facebook publications, to prison. Félix Daniel Pérez Ruiz, the author of a post calling on people to gather at a park in Las Tunas wearing white in a sign of protest against the government, was sentenced to five years. Cristhian de Jesús Peña Aguilera, who merely “activated the sharing option” — meaning he shared the post on Facebook — was sentenced to four years.
The documents in the case, including the latest sentences, were first obtained by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a civil-rights group based in Spain.
“We are looking at a process that criminalizes freedom of expression and demonstration,” the group said in a statement earlier this week. “The accusations are based primarily on the testimony of officials in counterintelligence and the Interior Ministry, repressive institutions normally tasked with neutralizing any political dissent.”
After a four-day trial last week, Cuba’s Supreme Court also announced that 15 residents in Bayamo who took part in “disturbances” in March last year were given sentences up to 15 years in prison, accused of several crimes, including public disorder, assault, resistance, contempt, disobedience and instigation to commit a crime.
Protests erupted in Bayamo, Santiago de Cuba and other cities last year, after days of hours-long blackouts and acute food shortages.
In a trial that began Wednesday, six Cubans, including independent journalist José Gabriel Barrenechea, also face sentences of up to nine years in prison for staging a cacerolazo protest, banging pots and pans during a blackout in the Villa Clara province in November 2024.
The cases are the latest in an ongoing crackdown to suppress protests and growing criticism of the government by Cubans frustrated with the deteriorating economic conditions and lack of liberties. Relatives of protesters and other political prisoners like Tristá Padilla seem to be a target in the repression wave.
Before her arrest in November last year, she had been advocating for the release of her husband, Damián de Jesús Hechavarría Labrada, an activist who was arrested in April 2021 for protesting a fine for selling medicinal herbs, for which he had a license. He is serving a five-year sentence.
Tristá Padilla spent 10 months in jail and was released on bond just before the first trial. In a Facebook video at the time, she said the indictment against her was “all lies, a manipulation, like everything else in this country.”
“There is no proof, no witnesses, there’s nothing here,” she said, pointing to the indictment document she was holding, in a video published by the women's rights group Alas Tensas.
Julio César Duque de Estrada Ferrer, whose son Dairon is in prison for protesting on July 11, 2021, was recently sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison, accused of trying to take a video of a long line to buy cooking gas tanks, and assaulting an Interior Ministry agent who told him to stop.
Citing all the recent cases, Johana Cilano, a regional researcher for Amnesty International, said the Cuban government “maintains systematic repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, resulting in the criminalization of protest and the persecution of any critical or dissident public voice.
“These are not isolated incidents,” she said in a post on X. “Protesters in Cuba are arbitrarily detained, some subjected to short-term enforced disappearances and unfair trials. Protest is a right; no one should be imprisoned simply for exercising their human rights.”