MIAMI, United States. – After knowing this Friday the convictions of the regime against Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez (Maykel Osorbo), the group Justicia 11J reported that now added up to 42 activists, opponents, independent journalists and members of religious organizations or civil society judges whose “political causes have been disguised as common crimes.”
this very Friday, the noon news aired manipulated excerpts from the trial against Otero Alcántara and Castillo Pérez, held on May 30 and 31, 2022 at the People’s Municipal Court of Central Havana.
The images were broadcast almost a month after the trial was held, the same day that the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Cuba reported that Otero Alcántara and Castillo Pérez had been damned to five and nine years in prison, respectively.
In this material, the regime tried to present both artivists as common criminals and not as political prisoners.
The journalist Gisela García Rivero, citing the Prosecutor’s Office, said that Otero Alcántara was not being judged “for his status as an artist or for his political ideas, but for the rejection and manifest indignation of the witnesses at what they considered disrespectful and demeaning. use of the national banner in the photos that Alcántara disseminated between 2019 and 2020”.
Likewise, the spokeswoman for the regime assured that the events involving the five citizens tried on May 30 and 31 were not crimes against State Security. “They classify as common crimes and threaten social order, citizen tranquility, respect for institutions and the nation’s jurisdiction.”
According to Justice 11J, there are now 636 people sentenced in relation to the historic protests of July 11 and 12, 2021. Of these, 589 have been sentenced in an ordinary trial and 47 in a summary trial.
“To date, we have documented the arrest of 1,481 people in the context of the July protest. Of these, 725 remain in Cuban prisons,” the human rights defense group also specified.
On the other hand, Justice 11J recalled that, according to a report issued by Prisoners Defenders in 2020, the number of convicts and sentenced annually in Cuba exceeds 127,000 people, which places the Island as the first country in people deprived of world freedom.
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