Three young people from Sancti Spíritus have joined those sentenced to prison for acts linked to the July 11 protests in Cuba. The Provincial Court made public this Tuesday the sentence for Leodán Pérez Colón, who received 5 years in prison, Yoanderley Quesada, 2 years, and Yoel Castillo, 1 year and 8 months.
The three young people were tried on December 27 and their sentence was scheduled for January 13, but was postponed for a week, according to the mother of the main defendant, Elizabeth Colon Peña, who described the delay as punishment and torture to relatives. His son was the only one who was in pretrial detention, while the other two convicted had been released pending trial.
Leodán Pérez Colón was arrested on July 16 at his home, located on Calle Independencia, between Tirso Marín and Frank País. The young man was with several colleagues, who were also detained and who, according to the Sancti Spiritus activist Néstor Estévez, behaved improperly during the trial “trying to implicate their friends to save themselves.”
According to his relatives, Pérez Colón was accused of making two direct calls through Facebook asking for Miguel Díaz-Canel to resign so that the country could improve.
According to his relatives, Pérez Colón was accused of making two direct calls through Facebook asking for Miguel Díaz-Canel to resign so that the country could improve, although the authorities considered it contempt, criminal association and acts against State Security.
According to him list of prisoners held by the Justicia 11J collective, Pérez Colón was arrested “for events after July 11, when they “took him out of his house accusing him of throwing stones at a nearby MLC store.” The young man, who served 22 years in the Nieves- Morejón, in Sancti Spíritus, was accused of criminal association, resistance and aggravated disobedience, according to the registry.
Yoanderley Quesada, who is considered a brother of Pérez Colón, was accused, on the other hand, “of conspiring to reactivate the protests”, while Yoel Castillo is the only case not documented in the lists of prisoners for 11J.
According to Estévez, of the 42 detainees in the province, only one went out to protest, Luis Mario Niedas Hernández, who was sentenced in October to three years in prison, half of what the Prosecutor’s Office requested for him for “disrespect, spread of epidemics and instigation to commit a crime.
Alexander Fábregas, the fifth of those sentenced in Sancti Spíritus as a result of the summer protests, was taken from his home and tried nine days later, he was sentenced to 9 months in prison.
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