Guillermo Fariñas is “kidnapped by State Security officers”, he denounced on his social networks Haisa Farinas. According to the daughter of the Cuban opponent, he is “in the Provincial Operations Unit of the State Security Directorate.”
The family already had contact with the dissident. “They only allowed my grandmother to enter this unit so that she could see him and bring him his medicine, food and toilet,” Haisa explained. Fariñas was arrested by State Security agents last Friday in the province of Villa Clara, three days before the first anniversary of July 11.
Haisa Fariñas made it known on Friday that patrol number 266 of the political police was watching her father’s house. Almost an hour later, she indicated that the agents of the aforementioned unit were joined by those of patrol 250 to arrest Guillermo Fariñas. “He was arrested in his own home,” she noted. “His whereabouts are unknown, they did not want to give details of the reason for the arrest and where they transferred him.”
At the beginning of this month, Fariñas published an investigation carried out together with Mabel Hernández White, and the former Ladies in White Dayamí Villavicencio Hernández and Yaima Villavicencio Hernández, on police violence against Zinadine Zidan Batista Álvarez in the El Condado neighborhood of Santa Clara. The 17-year-old teenager, killed at the hands of the Police, the opposition revealed, participated in the protests on July 11, 2021 and after spending 23 days in detention, he was released and fined 3,000 pesos.
“They only allowed my grandmother to enter this unit so that she could see him and bring him his medicines, food and toilet,” Haisa Fariñas explained.
The Sakharov Prize (2010) has been arrested and then released on several occasions, one of them in May, on his return to Havana from a tour of Europe and the US.
In one of those interrogations, he said that State Security threatened to charge him with rebellion or incitement to war, if he continued “issuing instructions” to incite another social outburst.
Fariñas is one of the best-known Cuban opponents, particularly for the numerous hunger strikes he has held in protest against the regime since the first in 1995.
The longest was in 2003 when he fasted for 14 months, and the 25th was in 2016, which lasted 54 days to ask the government to end the repression against dissidents.
The Government of Cuba, for its part, considers the dissidents “counterrevolutionaries” and “mercenaries” at the service of US interests and denies that it has political prisoners in its jails.
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