Madrid/The Pen Club of Cuban writers in exile, a subsidiary of the international organization that works in favor of freedom of expression and protects persecuted authors, has demanded from the Cuban regime the “immediate liberation” of the poet María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez, “and of all writers and human rights activists who still remain in prison. ” The activist celebrates a seven -year penalty in the Women’s Prison in El Guatao (Havana) for having taken to the streets to protest on July 11, 2021 (11J).
In a statement made public this Thursday, the NGO, based in Miami, celebrates the release “after the administration agreement of President Joe Biden and the Castro dictatorship” of “several political prisoners”, which “should never have been sentenced to prison”. However, they denounce, “many Cubans still remain in prison, including writers such as Garrido, whose only crime was to express themselves against the Cuban dictatorship.”
María Cristina Garrido was arrested in San José de las Lajas (Mayabeque) on July 12, 2021, the day after the historic protests, along with her sister, Angelica Garridowho was released, last July, having served his three -year prison sentence. In his text, the PEN points out that the poet “has faced very difficult detention conditions, which include insulation, abuse and lack of water and food.”
Accused of public disorder, contempt and resistance in March 2022, Garrido, as well as his sister, he starred in prison protests such as September 2022refusing to dress the uniform of common dams and starting a hunger strike.
“At discretion and contempt, little paper and pencil slipped and some spleece of crooked and bodyless pen”
The PEN also remembers that its most recent book, Captive voicehe was written in prison: “María Cristina Garrido could not restart writing until the 349th day of her imprisonment. At discretion and contempt, little paper and pencil slipped and some spare of crooked and bodyless pen. ”
The poet was one of the dams that organizations expected that they would appear within the list of 553 released by the Government, announced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on January 14 not as a pact with Biden – which took Cuba out of the list of sponsoring countries of terrorism that same day – but with the Vatican. Next to her, the white ladies Sissi Abascal and Sayli Navarroor artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Osorbo They are other most anticipated prisoners of consciousness in the street.
Far from granting release, and on the contrary, Abascal and Navarro continue to keep them in “severe regime” for being “negative dams” and deny benefits to which they already have the right.
The Cuban regime, who with the first release was hurried to clarify that They were not “neither an amnesty nor an pardon”but “benefits” that did not exempt them from prison from not complying with the “obligations”, he stopped these freedom on the same day that Donald Trump took possession as president of the United States and, at a few hours, he revoked the order of his predecessor and He returned to the island to the blacklist.
Until then, they register organizations such as Prisoners Defenders (PD), were released only to 200 political prisoners, of which 31, in addition, They had already served his conviction. Among them were historical opponents such as José Daniel Ferrer and Félix Navarro, as well as activists such as Pedro Albert Sánchez, Luis Robles or the Lady of Blanco Tania Echeverría.
Precisely Ferrer denounced Again the pressure he is receiving from the regime when he exposed that they brought a summons to his house to appear this Friday before a court which he refused to receive. “If that’s why I must return to prison, I gladly return to prison and in prison I keep until tyranny falls,” he said in a video shared on his social networks.
For Prisoners Defenders, the releases were nothing more than “a macabre game of the regime.” The total number of releases that the regime had given, 553, was “very emblematic,” said Javier Larrondo, president of PD, for being the same as their organization and others of protesters of July 11, 2021 imprisoned. “What they have done is, subliminally, let us fool ourselves alone, and that we think they are prisoners of 11J,” he said in statements to this newspaper on January 23.
