MADRID, Spain.- Pastor Lorenzo Rosales Fajardo of the Monte de Sion Church, in Palma Soriano, Santiago de Cuba, was sentenced to 7 years in prison for his participation in the popular demonstrations on July 11, 2021.
As reported to Radio Television Marti, Kiri Kankhwende, spokeswoman for World Christian Solidarity, Lorenzo Rosales’ family was officially notified of the conviction.
The sentence is one year less than what the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations had reported, said Kiri Kankhwende.
The spokeswoman recalled that the pastor “has been subjected to physical abuse in the Boniato prison.”
“More must be done so that the Communist Party of Cuba is accountable for injustices committed against the people of the Island by people like Pastor Lorenzo Rosales,” said Kankhwende.
In a report published in early 2022, CubaNet explained that one of Rosales’s repressive guards during 11J wrote a message to Mario Félix Lleonart, a Cuban Baptist pastor exiled in Washington, United States, and director of the Patmos Institute, which monitors religious freedom.
“I was one of the guards who urinated on his head in the early hours of July 14 when we were transferring him to Versalles (a police unit in the same province). We had no water and we thought we had ‘killed’ him from the beating we gave him on the road”, the guard confessed.
“If I didn’t participate, `the dead person would have been put by me’. (…) “Here they are set to ‘kill the pastor so that he does not tell everything that has been done to him,’” he added.
Repression of religious in Cuba
At the end of April, the event “Breaking the chains”, of the International Apostolic and Prophetic Ministry Wind Recio had to be postponed due to the repression of the Cuban State Security.
The meeting, based in Las Tunas, had the objective of praying for the political prisoners of 11J and for their families.
“We are being harassed because they are afraid of the event of the mothers of the 11 J prisoners. So because of his reprimands, because of his repression, because of his threats, we understood that the event could not be made public. Obviously we want to give it, because there is an extraordinary need for these mothers, because it is a purely religious event, not a political one, and our church has the right to give it,” said Pastor Mario Jorge Travieso, president of the Recio Wind Ministry.
The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) He suggested that Cuba should remain on the State Department’s Special Watch List, due to the increased repression against religious leaders during the last year.
In January 2022, the evangelical NGO Open Doors, based in the Netherlands, included to Cuba in its annual ranking of the 50 nations with the greatest persecution and discrimination against Christians.
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