Yindra Elizastigui, the mother of the activist Luis Robles, imprisoned a year and six months ago after demonstrating peacefully in the boulevard of San Rafael de La Habana, denounced in a live broadcast on Facebook this Thursday that five years of sentence for his son is unfair and that in the Combinado del Este, where the young man remains imprisoned, he has received constant mistreatment such as being photographed without clothes and against his will.
“Recently, my son informed me that they took him out of the cell and took him to an office with more people, prison leaders and members of State Security and others, and forced him to take off his clothes,” Elizastigui and assured that Robles refused. “He said that he was not going to take it off because that was not in any law, and they told him: ‘If you don’t take it off, we’ll take it off.’ He had to take off his clothes and they photographed him with a cell phone from the front and from the back.” .
The mother, after making the complaints at the Ministry of the Interior, received as a response from the regime that the photographs were taken for “an investigation into a publication made by a newspaper in which it was assured” that Luis Robles had been beaten “, For what they say, they took those images “to show the world that my son had no traces of physical abuse on his body.”
Without specifying which media outlet the Ministry of the Interior referred to, it said that “physical abuse was reported and that he was put in a punishment cell for five days, something that I believe because before he spent seven to nine days in a cell of punishment that almost cost him his life and where he shed his skin,” Elizastigui detailed before adding: “I believe in my son because the one who is in there is him, and I have proof that they have gone to extremes with my son.”
He also took advantage of the moment to remember that it is not the first time that Robles has been mistreated “physically and psychologically”. “My son informs me that whenever someone feels like it, abusing their position and power, they take them out of the cell at two or three in the morning until six in the morning.”
Elizastigui alleged that in 2019 he voted for the approval of the Constitution of the Republic and even “motivated and encouraged” the population to vote in favor. “That Constitution that in Article 54 states that we have freedom of expression,” he said.
“I have dared to do this direct today because in reality I already feel outraged, I feel uncomfortable with what is happening with my son,” she explained to emphasize that it is the only way she has to be heard by “those who need it do”.
“Perhaps many of the people who are seeing me and listening to me will say that it took me a long time because my son Luis Robles has been imprisoned for a year and six months, unjustly for me, and I know that for many as well.”
At the end of last March and after a year and three months in prison, Luis Robles, known as the “young man with the banner”, was sentenced to five years in prison for demonstrating peacefully with a sign in his hands calling for an end to of the repression and the freedom of the Cuban rapper Denis Solís. He was arrested on December 4, 2020 for protesting at the boulevard San Rafael, in Havana and accused of the crimes of enemy propaganda, contempt and disobedience.
“I believe in my son because the one who is in there is him, and I have proof that they have gone to extremes with my son”
Elizastigui confessed that he did not know who Denis Solís was or why his son had gone out to demonstrate asking for the freedom of the protesting rapper. “I don’t know why Luis did it, but perhaps he felt identified and motivated to do it, each person is different and we have to respect that”
According to the court ruling, to which he had access 14ymedioin the Robles trial it was “proved” that the young man “responded to a summons” from the influencer Cuban “Alexander Otaola” to speak out against the detention of Solís, “by the police authorities, the leaders of the State and the Government”, and to “carry out any act aimed at destabilizing internal order, demonstrate publicly in the streets against the Cuban economic and social system”.
The phrases “Freedom. No more repression. #free-Denis [Solís]”, which was read on the sign carried by Robles, “opposed the decisions of the authorities” that determined the arrest of Solís, justified the Provincial Court of Havana, where the activist was prosecuted.
At the beginning of this March, the 29-year-old published a letter in which he reiterated his fight and his goal: “freedom for the people of Cuba.” In the letter, Robles returns to the reasons that led him to carry out the peaceful protest that today has him in jail.
“I decided to break the silence because I got tired of seeing how my country is destroyed and the government does nothing to fix it,” he explains, “because I think that Cuba’s greatest enemy is not outside but sitting in the presidential chair.”
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