Civil society groups ask to investigate the death of a prisoner from the 2021 protests in Cuba. This is Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas, who committed suicide in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana, according to authorities.
Text: AP/VOA
Non-governmental organizations that monitor the situation of prisoners in Cuba requested on Tuesday to investigate the death in prison of a man who had been imprisoned since 2021 after being detained for participating in historic protests in July of that year against shortages and blackouts on the island.
The authorities maintain that Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas, 29, would have committed suicide in prison, although some of his relatives say that he would have died from the blows allegedly received when he tried to escape from the Combinado del Este prison, in Havana, where he was serving a six-year sentence.
Guillén, a member of an opposition group called the Patriotic Union of Cuba, died on Saturday and his remains were delivered to his family over the weekend.
“We will never know for sure what happened, unless they let us enter the prison and with total independence interview and reconstruct events,” Camila Rodríguez, the representative of Justicia 11J, an NGO that keeps a count, told The Associated Press on Tuesday. of the situation of the detainees and the protests in Cuba.
Cuban authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the AP.
Rodríguez indicated that the crime initially charged to Guillén was for “public disorder,” and although they estimate that due to the sentence he received, some others could have been added, they did not have access to the judicial documents of the case to corroborate it.
On July 11 and 12, 2021, unusual and massive protests were recorded in Havana and other cities in the country when thousands of people came out to complain about blackouts and shortages, in the midst of a harsh economic crisis that still affects the Caribbean nation. .
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In the following months there were others, but much more localized and smaller, in some of which anti-government slogans were also displayed.
The authorities were internationally criticized for the repressive reaction to the 2021 demonstrations, but they also pointed out that the government was under siege by a media campaign from the United States and interest groups from Florida, within the framework of Washington’s sanctions pressing a change of political model on the island.
In January 2022, the Attorney General’s Office indicated that there were 790 people investigated and prosecuted during these protests for crimes ranging from disorder or sabotage, to vandalism or attacks.
One of those arrested was Guillén.
“What we were able to know, through various sources, is that Manuel was trying to escape from prison, and was caught in the act. Hence the guards beat him, with marks on his body as evidence. Then, the prison authorities themselves spread the narrative that he had hanged himself in a punishment cell, and that it had been suicide,” the representative of Justicia 11J added in her conversation with AP.
According to the organization, it is the third verified death of a prisoner sentenced for protests in July 2021, but in previous cases there was no debate about the reason for the deaths: Yosandri Mullet jumped from a bridge last August during an exit permit —he was with his family—and had already tried to commit suicide once; and Luis Barrios died of a respiratory condition in November 2023.
Some 554 citizens remain detained in relation to the demonstrations that year, Justicia 11J recently reported.
Videos posted on the social network was murdered.
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For his part, in a live broadcast from his account on the social network Facebook, Yan Franco Esplugas, the deceased’s cousin, insisted on the version of the murder.
“They beat him to death,” Franco said through tears. “They killed him in prison, stop lying and deceiving him saying that he hanged himself.”
“This is for everyone to see, for the entire Ministry of the Interior (in charge of prisons), for everyone to investigate, to investigate what they did to Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas, my first cousin,” he added.
According to an 11J justice report previously published in April, Guillén himself told the Cuban Prison Documentation Center – based in Mexico – that he was held with violent common prisoners, affected by bedbug infestations and poorly fed.
The day before, the Undersecretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, United States Department of State, Brian A. Nichols, declared himself moved by the death of the detainee in his X account and considered that the prisoners should be immediately released by the Cuban government. .
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