Madrid/The activist Ángel Cuza was released this Monday and is at his home in Havana after leaving the Guanajay prison, in Artemisa, where he had been transferred from the Combinado del Este, in Havana. The Cubalex organization then denounced that the move was a consequence of Cuza’s alleged participation in a strike. The reasons for his release from prison are unknown, since the trial he faces has not yet been held and there is no formally known accusation.
The Cultural Rights Observatory celebrated the newsadding that the criminal process is still [está] unfinished. “Since he was arrested on July 25, 2025, he has been subjected to a sequence of irregularities that included punitive transfers and detention in areas of maximum severity without a prosecutor’s request. His case was documented and systematically followed by our Observatory, which denounces these practices as part of a strategy of punishment and harassment against independent artists and communicators,” the organization added.
The statement recalls that “the release does not erase the violations committed nor the direct responsibility of the Cuban State for the damage inflicted on an innocent citizen.”
Cuza, artist and independent reporter, was arrested on July 25 without the accusations being known with certainty. His daughter’s mother, Ana Castillo, then said that they were trying to involve him in a terrorism case for carrying a bullet as an amulet, “an object that he has always carried for many years because for us it has a religious meaning,” she said then.
The statement recalls that “the release does not erase the violations committed nor the direct responsibility of the Cuban State for the harm inflicted on an innocent citizen.”
Activist Anamely Ramos recently pointed out something similar, saying that the intention was to attribute to him “possession of explosives or something similar (…) for a small bullet that he was carrying and that he has had for years.” Ángel Cuza is also a delegate of the Democracy Movement (MD), member of the Opposition Movement for a New Republic (MONR) and promoter of Cuba Decide.
At the time of his arrest, the artist had only been free for 81 days. He had served his previous sentence in May 2025 and, when he left the prison, one of the officials warned him: “If you do anything, you will return to the same bed you left here.”
Cuza Alfonso, 39, began working as a DJ at parties and events at a very young age, and little by little acquired a political awareness that exploded in April 2021, when he participated in the peaceful sit-in in the park in Obispo with Aguacate, harshly repressed by the Cuban authorities. That afternoon, there was more than one dozen arrests in a group of people who tried to reach the house of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara – then on strike of hunger and thirst– to support him.
The protest was spread by Mary Karla Ares live, which allowed State Security not to be cruel against the protesters on sitebut they were all arrested. Cuza Alfonso, specifically, spent eight months in prison for “public disorder” and was released in January 2022.
From then until November 2023, Cubalex documented 10 arrests to try to prevent him from carrying out protest actions. But then came another of his worst moments: he was arrested for participating in an altercation in a queue to buy chicken, accused again of “public disorder” and taken to prison for a year and a half, until May 2025. That was his last sentence to date.
