Reyna Yacnara Barreto Batista will serve four years of correctional work with internment in the women’s prison of Granja 5, in Camagüey, for having demonstrated on July 11. The 21-year-old girl entered the prison this Thursday, accompanied by her parents to the door.
According reported the independent media Cuban Time, Barreto will have to remain in prison for a few days and then she will be transferred to “work camps”, where she will serve her sentence, probably in agricultural production.
The young woman was sentenced in a trial held on October 7, in which the Prosecutor’s Office initially asked her for five years in prison for the crimes of “attack” and “public disorder”, and on December 24 she lost the appeal to the final sentence. four years of correctional work with internment.
Barreto has said that when he took to the streets that Sunday, like thousands of Camagüeyans, the attitude of the protesters was peaceful at all times, and that the aggressive ones were the agents, uniformed or in civilian clothes, who confronted the citizens.
Before she could say anything, he kicked the girl in the left thigh. “A kick with a boot, a robust man, to me, to a girl all skinny”
One of the police officers said In an interview with Cuban Time, he hit an older man – which was recorded in one of the numerous videos shared on networks those days – and a boy threw himself on the floor to protect him. “Until that moment nothing had happened; ‘homeland and life’, ‘freedom’, even the national anthem was sung,” he assured journalist Henry Constantin.
Later, Barreto recounted, she also received a blow from an officer, with whom she went to confront her. Before she could say anything to him, he kicked her in the left thigh. “A kick with a boot, a robust man, me, a girl all skinny,” she narrated. All these actions were also recorded on video.
In the arrest of the young woman, which occurred on July 18, a week after the protests, 15 policemen intervened, and she was missing for a few days. After two weeks of isolation due to covid symptoms, she was released, but she continued to be harassed by State Security, according to the Cubalex organization in its list of 11J prisoners.
Cuban Time He points out that Barreto “has no criminal record” and that “the evidence and testimonies presented against him in the trials do not justify the aggression he received, much less the sentence imposed on him.”
They judge her, assures the Camagüeyan portal, “because ‘she has not shown repentance,’ according to Elizabeth Rojas, head of the court that presided over the appeal trial.”
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