The activist Luis Robles, the “young man with the banner”, was sentenced to five years in prison for demonstrating peacefully on the central San Rafael street Boulevard in Havana with a sign in his hands calling for an end to the repression and the freedom of Cuban rapper Denis Solís.
According to the court ruling, to which he had access 14ymedioin the trial it was “proved” that Robles “responded to a summons” from the influencer Cuban “Alexander Otaola” to speak out against the arrest 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, publicly demonstrate 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, “was opposed to the decisions of the authorities” that determined the arrest of Solís, justifies the Provincial Court of Havana, where the activist was prosecuted.
The sentence was dated March 28, the day the authorities notified Robles, but both the young man and his relatives only had access to the document on Wednesday, his brother Landy Fernández Elizastigui confirmed to this newspaper.
“The events were manipulated by digital platforms at the service of the enemy” to “discredit the professional functioning of the Cuban police authorities”
In the text, the judges affirm that the young man maintained a “marked interest in creating a destabilizing environment for the social system and internal economic development”, arguing that “he began to shout phrases like the ones he showed on the poster and others in disagreement with the decisions adopted by the country’s leadership to resist the economic blockade to which Cuba is subjected by the United States”.
Robles moved “from one place to another to invite the people who were there to follow him and thus create disorder. In addition, they argue that “the facts were manipulated by digital platforms at the service of the enemy” to “discredit the operation of the Cuban police authorities”.
The Prosecutor’s Office, in the trial that took place more than three and a half months ago, had requested six years in prison for the young man for the crimes of resistance and enemy propaganda. Robles’ request for a change of precautionary measure in his provisional prison was denied on several occasions.
Robles was arrested on December 4, 2020 for protesting on Boulevard San Rafael, in Havana. He demonstrated peacefully, showing with his arms raised a banner in which he asked for freedom, the end of the repression and the release of the anti-establishment rapper Denis Solís.
Three days before taking to the streets to demonstrate peacefully, Robles recorded a video that was published much later and where he spoke of his thoughts, desires and also the reasons that led him to be a protester.
“We wholeheartedly wish for a change, a change of system, a change of country, because communism has really turned this country into a true hell, a hell where it is practically impossible to breathe, not just breathe air, but breathe peace, breathe calm,” he said in the material.
“They have even taken away our freedom to think, they want to send even what we think”
At another point, he said that “freedom is the greatest thing one can have in life and these shameless communists since they arrived have cut off all kinds of freedoms, freedoms to a free religion, freedoms to a free ideology, freedoms to you choose who you want, not whoever is imposed on you”. And he continued: “They have even taken away our freedom to think, they want to command even what we think.”
At the beginning of this month of 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.”
Thus, he assures that his action was so that “fear and censorship do not continue to rule in Cuban society, so that expressing what you think and feel anywhere is not a reason to go to jail, because I want Cuba to be a country for Cubans, no matter their way of thinking, so that the streets of my country are for everyone and not just for the communists”.
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