Madrid/The Municipal Court of Matanzas has annulled the trial of Alina Barbara López Hernández and Jenny Pantoja, scheduled for this Friday, January 30. Both received this Thursday, in the hours before the hearing, an order in which alludes to a reorganization of judicial activity as a reason for the suspension and indicates that the situation will not change “until a new date of appointment.”
López and Pantoja are accused of the crime of attack for the events that occurred on June 18, 2024, when they had an incident with the agents who were trying to prevent the protests that take place that day of each month. In May 2025, the Prosecutor’s Office requested four years of deprivation of liberty for the intellectual, replaced by correctional work without confinement, while for the anthropologist it requested three years, also with the option of being replaced by correctional work.
According to Pantoja, who made the order public on her Facebook account, the lawyer reported after five in the afternoon this Thursday that she had received the document. “The trial seems to be dragging on infinitely. We have been patient, but we are not willing to continue, forever and ever, unjustly limited by precautionary measures,” denounces the activist.
Pantoja adds that this is a political trial and that “they should never have prosecuted citizens who, in the exercise of their rights, received all the police brutality on their bodies.” Furthermore, he considers that the real reason for suspending the act is the Cuban regime’s intention to “evade carrying out a process, due to the high cost it has for them.”
López Hernandez has not spoken yet, although both are expected to give more explanations this Friday through the Cuba X Cuba platform.
The one who did do so was the Cuban economist and friend of Professor Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo, who asked the magistrates to have “courage” and cancel the trial definitively. “Annul this farce that will be one more stain of shamelessness for the Cuban judicial system, as are all the sentences that have been issued by the courts that have tried those who have protested against a regime that keeps the country in misery and wants us all to accept it as if we were servants,” he wrote on social networks.
The economist considers “shameful” the behavior of the Island’s judges, “who have renounced their duty to dispense justice. When what they dispense is injustice, they lose their very nature and lose the respect of the people, because they renounce their duty to submit to power.” Miranda Parrondo also asked for “freedom for all political prisoners in Cuba.”
López Hernández and Pantoja denounced that, on the day the events for which they are accused occurred, both were victims of mistreatment. According to the teacher’s testimony, they were trying to stop her when the agent applied a “martial arts technique” to her, causing her to fall and hit her head hard. The intellectual was later diagnosed with post-traumatic labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear that affects balance.
“The obvious intention is to get involved in a common, non-political process,” López said then, on whom a measure of house confinement was imposed.
Torres and Pantoja have received solidarity from friends, intellectuals and international human rights organizations, who are calling for an end to coercive measures against freedom of expression and demonstration.
