Madrid/The oral hearing in which the former Minister of Economy and Deputy Prime Minister is being accused of espionage Alejandro Gil Fernandez continues to take place this Thursday, one day longer than expected. Thus he assures 14ymedio a source close to the case who requests anonymity, who also says that the secrecy is “total.”
Inside the room where the trial is taking place, in the Popular Civil and Family Court of Marianao, in Havana, the only family member who has been allowed to attend is the son of the former official, Alejandro Gil González, from whom “no type of statement” is expected, says the same informant.
In the vicinity of the place, both this Thursday and yesterday, the same movement that occurred on Tuesday, the first day of the hearing, was announced less than 24 hours in advance on the midday news. Only three State Security agents, one of them on a motorbike, were guarding the place, which contrasted with the operation two days ago, when streets and businesses were closed. Neither this Wednesday nor today has the international press observed it, unlike that day.
The sister of the former minister, María Victoria Gil, a lawyer by training, is surprised that he is being tried in that court in Marianao
The former minister’s sister, María Victoria Gil, a former Cuban television presenter and a lawyer by training, is surprised that he is being tried in that court in Marianao and not in the main headquarters of the Supreme People’s Court (TPS), the body that processes him, in Old Havana. For this, there is no explanation. “I am left without arguments,” he told this newspaper.
This Wednesday, in statements to influencer Cuban resident in Canada Darwin SantanaVicky Gil proposed three possible scenarios. The first, “that the Prosecutor’s Office make its provisional conclusions definitive and maintain its request for a life sentence,” said the former presenter, although the specific prosecutor’s request is 30 years. The second, that the prosecutor’s office reaches “other, more moderate conclusions, and with a lesser sanction”, and a third, “that the Prosecutor’s Office withdraws the accusation”, something that, he confessed, “is like asking God for something impossible.” For the former minister’s sister, in any case, “it is a sentence already passed.”
A fourth scenario, not mentioned by María Victoria Gil, is that the Court, with Ruben Remigio Ferro in front, raise the prosecutor’s request and dictate the maximum penalty, one of the punishments provided for the crime of espionage and in force in the Penal Code although it has not been applied on the Island since 2003. The president of the TPS himself, two years ago, carried out a public plea in favor of the death penaltywhich he defined as the “crown jewel” of the Military Penal Code Law.
Then, Ferro recalled that a “death penalty” had not been applied for twenty years, since “those events of the hijacking of the boat and all that situation that occurred,” that is, the theft in 2003 of the boat that was making the trip. between Regla and Old Havana with the aim of reaching the United States. The boat soon ran out of fuel and ten people were arrested and prosecuted. Among them, nine days later, after a very summary trial, Lorenzo Copello, Bárbaro Sevilla and Jorge Martínez were shot.
“There is no official statement about it, but all this time that has passed is a kind of undeclared moratorium. That does not mean that it does not exist”
“There is no official statement in this regard, but all this time that has passed is a kind of undeclared moratorium. That does not mean that it does not exist,” said the TPS president regarding the maximum penalty. And he justified: “We have to have it there as an element of defense of our society, as a defense of our State, of our Revolution, against the very serious threats in which we constantly live.”
Of this possible outcome for the trial of Gil Fernández, who has another trial pending for the rest of the charges – a dozen, including embezzlement, tax evasion and influence peddling -, in which around twenty people will also be prosecuted, including senior officials of the regimeThe ruling party doesn’t say anything either. These days, it has limited itself to disseminating, through different mediafragments of the interview conducted by Granma to Arnel Medina Cuenca“doctor in Legal Sciences”, who explained why the trial is held behind closed doors.
“That decision corresponds exclusively to the Court, which is the one that analyzes the specific case, and has all the elements of the Prosecutor’s Office and the defense,” the specialist declared to the Communist Party newspaper. “The Cuban criminal process, regulated by Law 143, establishes in its article 477 that the oral trial is public, unless reasons of national security, morality, public order or the respect due to the victim or their relatives make it advisable to hold it behind closed doors.” That the crime being tried is espionage – “extremely serious, because it directly threatens national security,” said Medina Cuenca – is the TPS shield for not holding a public hearing.
Thus, what the daughter of the former minister had requested was denied, Laura Maria Gilin publications on networks after learning of the Court’s decision on television on Monday afternoon.
Alejandro Gil Fernández is defended by the lawyer Abel Solá Lópezwith extensive experience in trials against State security. One of them was the one who sentenced, in 2017, Alina López Miyares and her husband, Félix Martín Milanés Fajardo, to 13 and 17 years in prison, respectively, for espionage. That process, carried out on October 2 in the Courtroom of the Marianao Military Court, was also behind closed doors and “without access to the relatives of the accused.”
