Ten prisoners in Holguín for whom the Prosecutor’s Office maintained its request for very high sentences went on a hunger strike at the end of the 11J trial this Friday. So reported the doctor Alejandro Raul Pupo Casas in their networks, alerted by the mother of one of the defendants, William Manuel Leyva Pupo, a relative of the doctor.
For this 20-year-old, the Prosecutor’s Office requested 18 years, as for Reymundo Fernandez Rodríguez, Jorge Luis Martínez García, Marcos Antonio Pintueles Marrero and Yoel Ricardo Sánchez Borjas.
The same source warns that the families of the prisoners will accompany them in their protest, although it does not specify who the other prisoners are. planted.
The sentences will be officially announced on February 11, according to what was spread through Facebook by relatives of the defendants.
The sentences will be officially announced on February 11, according to family members of the accused, and all of them take it for granted that the judges will comply with the requests of the prosecutors, as usually happens in political trials.
Three more processes for 11J also ended this Friday, in Santa Clara, Havana and Mayabeque.
In this city, reports the Efe agency based on relatives of the prisoners, a trial was held this week of which relatives of prisoners claim they had no prior knowledge.
At the moment, it is known that Holguín is where they requested the highest penalties to the demonstrators of last July 11, accused of “sedition”. The prosecutor Fernando Valentín Sera Planas –included in the list of repressors from the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba together with a dozen colleagues – requested 30 years in prison for Miguel Cabrera Rojas, Yosvany Rosell García Caso, José Ramón Solano Randiche and Iván Colón Suárez for the crime of sedition; 28 years for Maikel Rodríguez del Campo and Mario Josué Prieto Ricardo; 25, for Cruz García Domínguez, Miguel Enrique Girón Velázquez and Yasmany Crespo Hernández, and 22 for Yoirdan Revolta Leyva.
The only woman for whom they asked for such high sentences in Holguín is Jessica Lisbeth Torres Calvo, for whom they asked for 27 years, the same as she is now.
“She was very upset, crying, they took her phone, the hard drive on which she had the habeas corpus document, the hearing aids”
It is also known that the four minors prosecuted for the same crime – Yeral Michel Palacios Román, Ernesto Abelardo Martínez Pérez, Ayan Idalberto Jover Cardosa and Keyla Roxana Mulet Calderón – they downgraded the original request, from 15 years to between 5 and 7.
During the last day of the trials, the harassment by State Security against the relatives and friends of the prisoners who have demonstrated publicly intensified.
In Santa Clara, where they went judged 16 protesters, the activist Saily González was held for a few hours, as were the relatives of the young Andy García Lorenzo, arrested in the morning hours, when they went to court, like every day since the process began, last Monday.
According to sources close to Saily González, his arrest took place when he was preparing to present an appeal for habeas corpus in favor precisely of the family of García Lorenzo. All of them had their phones seized and were fined 3,000 pesos. “She was very upset, crying, they took her phone, the hard drive in which she had the document she presented from the habeas corpus, the headphones. Now neither she nor Andy García’s family have a way to communicate,” activist Víctor Arias, visited by González after being released, at around seven o’clock at night, told this newspaper.
The plainclothes agents who identify themselves as Ignacio and Elías, she continues, always tell her that they are going to accuse her of “disrespect or sedition” for the posts she makes on her social networks.
Arias also confirmed the release of Andy García’s sister, Roxana, and her partner Jonathan López, but warned that his father, Pedro López, “has left instruction and there is still no news of him.”
Andy García’s family has been one of the most active in denouncing the irregularities of the trials, in which, they say, the prosecution’s witnesses lie. One of them, according to Tayri Lorenzo, the young man’s mother, said at the hearing in Santa Clara that State Security negotiated with him to only fine him in exchange for using his testimony to implicate the accused.
They are not the only ones who have suffered the siege by the political police. Yudinela Castro, mother of Rowland Castillo, a 17-year-old accused of “sedition” and whom the Prosecutor’s Office is asking for 23 years in prison for participating in the 11J protests in Havana, told 14ymedio that State Security is pressuring her not to report her son’s situation.
“Yesterday I received a summons, I was not at home but they called me on the phone and left it under my door. It was around 12 at night,” he says. From the great annoyance that it caused him to see that paper when he got home, he tore it up.
The plainclothes agents who identify themselves as Ignacio and Elías, she continues, always tell her that they are going to accuse her of “disrespect or sedition” for the posts she makes on her social networks and the statements she has given to the press. “They tell me that I am relating to terrorists and counterrevolutionaries.”
Castillo, imprisoned in the Prison for Young People of the West, in El Guatao, is from Mantilla, and that Sunday of the protests, he was arrested on the corner of Toyo, in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, one of the epicenters of the demonstrations and where a police patrol was overturned.
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