Gerardo Díaz Alonso, one of the protesters on July 11 in Cárdenas, Matanzas, has been on a hunger strike since Friday, in protest of the 14 years to which he was sentenced for the crimes of sabotage and public disorder.
His wife, Mercedes Sánchez, with whom he has two children – one a year and a half old and the other just 20 days old – expresses to 14ymedio “the pain and impotence” that she feels to see her partner in that situation, which she considers “an injustice”. The woman is also worried because Díaz Alonso “suffers from his kidneys,” and she fears that her body “will not react very well.”
The prison director himself called relatives to convince him to stop the hunger strike. Thus, Sánchez was able to see her husband this Wednesday. “His state of health is very delicate,” warns this 23-year-old, who says that the prisoner’s mother, who accompanied her, “became very ill” when she saw him: “He is skinny, his face had no color and he He went sideways; seeing him so badly, he talked to him to drink water, even if it was, and he accepted”.
Díaz Alonso told his wife that they had him in a “punishment cell” but that, after several days of the strike, they transferred him to the infirmary because his health had worsened.
Díaz Alonso told his wife that they had him in a “punishment cell” but that, several days after the strike, they transferred him to the infirmary because his health had worsened. According to his account, they promised him that this Thursday they would visit the prisoner from the Prosecutor’s Office, “supposedly, so that he raises his situation.”
Although the trial was held in December, he did not receive his sentence until January 29. Her family could not have her until days later, on February 3, which prevented them from appealing. “Since it was for the Military Prosecutor’s Office, we only had five days,” explains his wife, who denounces that the papers arrived late and they were not even notified of the sanction by phone.
The trial, denounces Mercedes Sánchez, “was very bad, even with manipulated photos.” The woman assures that “only one witness accused him and it is from the police” and that in the only video presented in the trial as incriminating evidence, he “does not come out throwing stones at anything”, but “standing on a corner”.
Díaz Alonso’s lawyer, continues his wife, argued at the trial that her client “has mental retardation problems,” but far from taking it into account, “they invented many things and put him as if he were a worst offender.”
“They said they had made inquiries in the neighborhood but no official ever went to do anything,” he continues, “they just invented a circus of lies.” Some lies, he regrets, “made up by themselves, as they have done with all the prisoners of 11J, to find reasons to condemn them.”
“They said they had made inquiries in the neighborhood but no officer ever went to do anything,” he continues, “they just invented a circus of lies”
Her 33-year-old husband was sentenced along with eight other people: Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz (sentenced to 15 years), Leidiana Prohía Guevara (12 years), José Carlos Hernández Barrio (14 years), Yoniel Santana Rodríguez (10 years) , José Antonio Cue Monzón (10 years old), Enoc Noé Fernández Fernández (10 years old), Yasniel Roque Valle (5 years old) and Jorge Luis Argüelles Bayate (15 years old), who was also charged with robbery with violence.
Three other defendants were not sentenced for sabotage, but they were sentenced for other alleged serious crimes: Alain Roselló Fernández (7 years for robbery with force and public disorder), Jorge Gilberto Carrillo Isaac (6 years for robbery with force) and Reydel Canasí Reyes ( 7 years for attack and public disorder).
The case of Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díaz, 34, is particularly dramatic, as he was also wounded during his arrest. The images of that moment, precariously recorded, spread like wildfire on social networks and, ultimately, served the regime to try to discredit it.
On the other hand, another 11J prisoner, William Manuel Leyva Pupo, he is also on a hunger strike “indefinite”, since Tuesday. The young man from Holguín, 21 years old and sentenced to 12 years for the crime of “sedition”, sent a telephone message from prison declaring himself a “peaceful dissident” and “arbitrarily in prison”, and argues that he prefers to die before to continue suffering what he calls “infrahuman and degrading psychological torture” imposed by the regime on all the July protesters.
Leyva Pupo was already planted on a previous occasion, just when his trial was held, last January, along with nine other prisoners, in protest at the high prison sentences that the Prosecutor’s Office requested for them. For Leyva Pupo they asked for 18 years, which were finally 12 in the sentence, received this February.
Also on hunger strike, but without trial and for more than a month, he is Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara. The artist, leader of the San Isidro Movement, was arrested on July 11, but not for demonstrating, but for a previously charged cause, the same under which the singer Maykel Castillo remains in prison Osorb. During a party on April 4 on Damas Street, in Old Havana, in which the activists and local residents sang the song Homeland and Life, the police tried to arbitrarily detain Osorbo, but he refused to get on the patrol car.
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