The five-year prison sentence that the Provincial Court of Sancti Spíritus pronounced against Leodán Pérez Colón was for the crime of “association to commit a crime” and two of “disrespect”, in no case for stoning a store, he points out this Thursday to 14ymedio his mother, Elizabeth Colón Peña, who attended the trial at the end of December.
“On July 11 he did not go out, but he did a direct from the house that they consider contempt because he addressed the president who was speaking on television in a very bad way,” the woman details. That broadcast, or a fragment of it, was precisely used by the official Cuban television to try to discredit those detained for the demonstrations.
Another crime of contempt and conspiracy to commit a crime was charged to the young man on July 16, when he was taken prisoner, says Colón Peña, who has not yet received a copy of the sentence.
The Sancti Spiritus activist Néstor Estévez, who now resides in the US, insisted this Wednesday in a network broadcast that the “stoning of the shop window” never happened, and he attributed the mistake of spreading it to himself, because “when began to build the story, everything was based on the testimonies and the gossip”.
In his broadcast, he also emphasized that Leodán Pérez is not “a person we can point to as someone who stoned a store window in MLC.”
“In the record of information that there is about what happened in Sancti Spíritus, it was said that there were some boys arrested for throwing stones at a store and then we learned that these were other boys,” he clarified.
Leodán Pérez Colón was arrested on July 16 at his home, located on Independencia Street, between Tirso Marín and Frank País, Sancti Spíritus.
This Wednesday this newspaper reported of the decision of the Provincial Court, which sentenced Leodán Pérez Colón to 5 years in prison, Yoanderley Quesada, 2 years, and Yoel Castillo, 1 year and 8 months.
The note specified that the three young people were tried on December 27 and their sentence was scheduled for January 13, but it was postponed for a week, according to Colón Peña. In addition, Leodán Pérez’s mother described the delay as punishment and torture of family members. His son was the only one who was in pretrial detention, while the other two accused and now convicted had been released pending trial.
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 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 for his resignation to Miguel Díaz-Canel so that the country could “prosper”, although the authorities considered it contempt, criminal association and acts against State Security. .
Yoanderley Quesada, who considers himself the brother of Pérez Colón, was accused, instead, of “conspiring to reactivate the protests,” while Yoel Castillo is the only undocumented case on the 11J prisoner lists.
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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