The Prosecutor’s Office asks for six years in jail for Barrenechea for a peaceful protest, while OCDH denounces the arbitrariness of the process and the criminalization of dissent on the island.
Madrid, Spain.- The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH) He reported on Tuesday That the intellectual and independent journalist José Gabriel Barrenechea Chávez will be tried on September 24, at 9:00 in the morning, in the Popular Provincial Court of Villa Clara. Barrenechea has been in provisional prison for more than ten months and the prosecution asks for him Six years in jail for the alleged crime of “public disorders.”
Barrenechea, collaborator of 14ymedio And critic of the regime, was arrested on November 7, 2024 at the crossroads, Villa Clara, when neighbors went out after 48 hours without electricity. According to the accusation, he shouted “put the current, we want the current” and urged those present not to give up the protest. This case is another sample of the criminalization of the peaceful protest in Cuba.
A trial with political accusations
The tax request is not limited to its participation in the demonstration. The document also indicates it for “showing total disaffection for the revolutionary process and its maximum leader”, an openly political argument and outside the criminal law. It also stigmatizes it for “not having recognized labor link” and for alleged relations with people of “bad morality and social behavior”, recurring phrases in the political judgments with which the regime tries to delegitimize their critics.
The case is registered under file 944 of 2024 and drags five other defendants. For some of them, requested convictions are even more disproportionate: nine years in jail for Yandri Torres Quintana and Rafael Javier Camacho Herrera; five years for Rodel Barbaro Rodríguez Espinosa and Marcos Daniel Díaz Rodríguez; and four years for Yuniesky Lorences Domínguez. All of them have remained in preventive detention for almost a year, without judgment or legal guarantees.
Prison and Inhuman Conditions
Since his arrest, Barrenechea has been locked in the prison, in Santa Clara, an installation marked by overcrowding and unhealthiness. In a message sent from jail and shared by his family with Cubanet, He denounced: “I have been imprisoned for 258 days without having been sanctioned. The official response is always that there are no prosecutors or judges, that the files accumulate for thousands.” His lawyer filed a Habeas Corpus appeal, rejected without convincing explanation.
Barrenechea’s mother, Zoila Esther Chávez, 84 years old and with cancer, asked to see his son before he died, but the authorities prevented him. The old woman died in May and the writer only allowed her to attend the funeral for an hour and a half. The Observatory described this decision as a violation of the right to human dignity.
The trial against Barrenechea not only seeks to punish an uncomfortable intellectual, but also send a message of intimidation to those who dare to question power. Far from imparting justice, this process shows the use of the judicial system as an instrument of political repression in Cuba.
