Madrid/Around midnight this Thursday, activist Jenny Pantoja Torres – convalescing from chikungunya – was released after several hours of arrest at the Dragones and Zulueta police station, in Havana. She was the last to leave what her friends describe as a kidnapping, since teacher Alina Bárbara López Hernández – who demonstrates with her on the 18th of each month in Parque Libertad in Matanzas – and journalist Jorge Fernández Era, who carried out the same action with her, left hours before.
Also arrested this Thursday was Lilia Borroto López, daughter of López Hernández, who demonstrated to protest her mother’s situation.
“They have already released Jenny from the station where she was kidnapped, and I say kidnapped because it is nothing more than detaining you without committing a crime to subject you to a dirty cell that looks like a barracks, while they intimidate and threaten you, and then release you. Thank you to all those who supported on the networks and to Leo, Gretel and Alina who accompanied her husband and me out of the station so that she would not be alone. While you are divided, we are going to multiply the support and solidarity, to see how we play,” her friend, activist Miryorly García, wrote on social media.
Shortly before, Cecilia Borroto López had confirmed the departure of her mother and her sister, also infected with chikungunya. “My mother, Alina Bárbara López Hernández, is fine, but very exhausted, as is Jorge Fernández Era and my sister Lilian Borroto López. They arrived home without eating anything all day and in the middle of a blackout. Now they must recover,” said the young woman, who advanced that this Friday those affected will explain in detail what happened and announced that they issued “warning reports for illogical reasons.”
“My mother, Alina Bárbara López Hernández, is fine, but very exhausted, as is Jorge Fernández Era and my sister Lilian Borroto López. They arrived home without eating anything all day and in the middle of a blackout”
López and Fernández Era were arrested by the Police when they were on their way to carry out their usual protest for the freedom of Cuban political prisoners. “She was on her way to the park for her usual protest. She sent me a message before they stopped her,” Lilian told 14ymedio before being arrested, when she was on her way to demonstrate to ask for her mother to be released.
Alina Bárbara López and Jenny Pantoja have a pending trial, the first for contempt, disobedience and attack, while the second is attributed only to this last crime. The Prosecutor’s Office has requested, respectively, four and three years of deprivation of liberty, replaceable by correctional work without confinement, but the historian has described the case as a “judicial farce” for political reasons.
The Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH), based in Madrid, stated that the arrests occur “in a context marked by administrative threats and control actions by State Security, linked to the exercise of freedom of expression and demonstration.”
