Havana/The opponent Mario Alberto Hernández Leyva, vice president of the opposition movement for a new republic, was released this Tuesday, September 9, but his departure from the east combined is far from being full freedom. According to related to Radio Martíthe authorities ordered him to appear every Friday at the police station of section 21 of State Security, in Marianao, under penalty of returning to prison if he breaches.
“They have me prisoner, but on the street, controlled,” said Hernández Leyva. The Inter -American Human Rights Commission document that the activist had been previously arrested on February 17, 2023 and released in January 2024. Then, in June of that same year, he was arrested again and sanctioned two years in jail for the crimes of “resistance” and “contempt”, charges used recently to silence the dissent.
During his imprisonment he went through several prisons and correctional work camps, sometimes without family visits or right to pass. On August 13, 2025 he thought he would recover his freedom when he fulfilled the sanction, but he was held five more days in the Vivac, under a new accusation of “disobedience” for refusing to form in prison. He was finally transferred to the east combined, where he remained until this week.
Hernández Leyva ensures that his current situation is a harassment strategy to keep it under control. “I will not stop being me. I will continue to be a human rights defender,” he said after his release.
In August only 13 new political arrests were documented
Its release occurs in a context of sustained growth of the number of political prisoners in Cuba, which reached in August a new record of 1,185 cases, according to the most recent report of Prisoners Defenders. Only in that month 13 new arrests of a political nature were documented, mostly citizens who protested on blackouts, food shortage or abuse of the authorities.
Among the new prisoners is Adrián González Pérez, a Guantanamo worker arrested on August 12 after publicly protesting against a fine of 36,000 pesos. The young Leonardo Maleta Veranes, an orphan, arrested in Santiago de Cuba for writing slogans also appears asking for the freedom of the leader of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, José Daniel Ferrer. Both remain provisional prison without trial.
The report also includes the case of Pavel Torres Rodríguez, held since October 2024 for criticism of the Facebook regime and accused of “propaganda against the constitutional order”, a crime that entails up to eight years in jail. Torres, who suffered a heart attack, has denounced the disappearance of his judicial file and considers starting a hunger strike.
Seven of the new cases come from May protests in Bayamo and Jiguaní, province of Granma. Among them is Alexander Guzmán Silva, a young director of Republican Youth Impact, who reported having been brutally beaten in the prison of the new sleeves and threatened to “rot in jail” if he talked about the abuses.
Another prisoner, Pedro Luis Zamora Isaac, received head injuries that required sutures after an aggression inside the prison. The authorities keep the protesters accused of “public disorders” and “attack”, without a judge having reviewed the cases.
The report highlights the 10 -year prison sentence against Erisbel Álvarez Yanes and Yosbel Carbajal de la Paz, accused of traffic of people after returning in a vessel from the US. The NGO denounces that the process was plagued by irregularities and that its “migratory potential” was used as aggravating, which shows, he says, the criminalization of the right to free circulation.
In the last 12 months 152 new political prisoners have been added, an average of 13 per month
In Villa Clara, six snack neighbors, including the writer José Gabriel Barrenechea and the young Rafael Camacho Herrera, face fiscal requests between four and nine years in prison for participating in a protest against the blackouts in November 2024. The file recognizes that the demonstration was peaceful, but the prosecution used as aggravating the “ideological profile” of the accused.
In the last 12 months 152 new political prisoners have been added, an average of 13 per month. Since 2021, almost 3 million Cubans have emigrated, mostly to the United States, in what the report describes as an exodus caused by “the barbarism of misery and repression.”
While some leave the list of political prisoners for compliance with sanction or forced exile – as with the activist Aymara Nieto Muñoz In August – others enter each month, keeping the number of imprisoned. Prisoners Defenders also document that 33 minors remain processed or complying with a sentence and that 472 prisoners suffer from serious diseases without adequate medical care.
“Every month that passes, the regime becomes more repressive,” warns the NGO, which denounces a systematic pattern of arbitrary arrests, judgments without guarantees and use of criminal figures such as “disobedience” or “resistance” to criminalize acts of peaceful expression, the same accusations that have kept Hernández Leyva under constant persecution.
