Havana Cuba. — From the most rigorous Combinado del Este penitentiary center in Havana, inmates informed CubaNet that the activist and political prisoner Yuri Almenares Gonzalez He is on hunger strike and in solitary confinement.
In a telephone call made from the prison on December 1, Yuri Almenares González himself expressed his intention to start the protest, although the conversation could not be recorded because the call was monitored the whole time by a guard and he was only allowed to with the objective that he could communicate with a relative to ask him to manage the appeal of his sentence.
The political prisoner was able to indicate that he had received notification of his sentence, consisting of seven years in prison. He also pointed out that the military prohibited him from using the phone for the next two months in what he considered a clear attempt to prevent him from reporting his situation. The inmate added that, from that moment on, he went on a hunger strike in protest of the sentence.
This information was corroborated on the afternoon of that same day (December 1) by telephone by a 9/11 protester, who, on condition of anonymity, communicated to report that the young influencer had had his phone suspended for two months and that he he had planted in protest of both the conviction and the restriction of communications.
Similarly, on December 2, also on condition of anonymity, a relative of another prisoner held in building 3 contacted CubaNet to indicate that the activist Yuri Almenares González had declared a hunger strike the day before.
Yuri Almenares González, 41 years old, is an activist of the Civic Democratic Movement “A New Republic” Arnaldo Zapata Tamayo. After more than two years in preventive detention, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for the alleged crime of contempt of the figure of the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel as punishment for his publications on social networks.
At the end of November, he denounced by telephone that from the morning of the 20th of that month until after two in the afternoon of the following day he was subjected to the punishment known as “fixation”, which consists of handcuffing the prisoner to a torture bench for time determined by the repressors, without water, without food and without the right to go to the bathroom, for which the victim is forced to relieve himself.
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