The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued a resolution in which he describes the situation of Cuban opponent Luis Robles as “serious risk.” Robles, known as “the young man with the banner”, was arrested in December 2020 for demanding the freedom of musician Denis Solís, on Havana’s San Rafael boulevard.
In the document, the IACHR, an organization belonging to the Organization of American States, describes several precautionary measures to protect the rights and integrity of the prisoner.
“He continues to be deprived of liberty in the circumstances described and may become the object of further violations of his rights,” adds the Commission, which proposes as measures that the 29-year-old inmate be able to access adequate medical care and receive medication for the chronic gastritis that he suffers from. In addition, he demands that his relatives and lawyers be able to visit him in prison.
The Commission asks that some “alternative to the deprivation of his liberty” be assessed and that action be taken in the face of the threats and harassment that Roble suffers in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, where he is serving a five year sentence for the crimes of enemy propaganda and disobedience.
“He continues to be deprived of liberty in the circumstances described and may become the object of further violations of his rights”
The Cuban State must inform the Commission within 15 days if it has adopted the proposed precautionary measures, although since the Madrid-based organization Prisoners Defenders initiated this request, there has been no government response on the case.
Among the background information and reports that the Commission evaluated to document its resolution were the contributions of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations Organization, which asked the Cuban State to release Robles “immediately” during his 91 term of sessions.
Taking up the complaint by Prisoners Defenders, the Commission notified that Robles had been held in solitary confinement by telephone with his family and that he survives in “subhuman conditions.” He adds that on February 12, 2021, Robles asked for medication and was told that “they did not give it to him so that he would just die there.” In addition, he has suffered beatings by State Security agents during his imprisonment. The document also reports that “the young man with the banner” remained naked and slept on the floor for two nights, in punishment cells, by order of the prison authorities.
“The Commission considers that the proposed beneficiary, deprived of liberty since December 2020 after a public demonstration, would be in severe conditions of detention in the Combinado del Este prison and has not received access to the necessary medications for his chronic illness to date. , after 1 year and 8 months of detention,” states the resolution.
“The leaders love to remind prisoners that they must fulfill their duties, but they forget that they also have rights”
In recent June, Yindra Elizastigui, mother of Robles, reported that his son he has received constant mistreatment, such as being photographed without clothes, against his will.
The mother, after presenting the pertinent complaints at the Ministry of the Interior, received as a response from the regime that the photographs were taken for “an investigation into a publication made by a newspaper in which it was assured that Luis Robles had been beaten.” “, for what they assure they took those images” to show the world that my son had no traces of physical abuse on his body.
On July 23, Robles’ mother revealed that the head of the prison unit where her son is being held told her that they will not grant him the “minimum” benefit, that is, the transfer to a work camp upon completing one year and three months sentence. “Keeping in mind that he has not behaved well, because he has made some calls abroad denouncing the abuses to which he has been subjected,” the woman wrote in Facebook.
Yindra Elizastigui has filed complaints about violations of prisoners’ rights and recalls that Luis Robles is the father of a two-year-old boy. “The leaders love to remind prisoners that they must fulfill their duties, but they forget that they also have rights.”
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