Migdalia Gutierrez Padron, mother of one of the sentenced youths for demonstrating on July 11 of last year in La Güinera, Havana, she was detained for a few hours this Monday, one year after that historic day. The reason: having dressed in white.
As Gutiérrez Padrón herself tells 14ymedio, after noticing this morning that he had a police patrol around the corner from his house, he decided to meet up with his neighbor Maria Luisa Fleita Bravoalso the mother of a 11J protestor prisoner, dressed in white and had their picture taken while holding a piece of sheet with the names and photos of their children, Brusnelvis Cabrera Gutiérrez and Rolando Vázquez Fleita.
After a while, a State Security agent knocked on his door. “He asked me what I was going to do, I told him nothing, and suddenly another car arrived with more policemen.” Immediately, she was taken to the Capri Police Station. “They told me that I couldn’t wear white, that at least today, these days, I couldn’t, that this is support for the Ladies in White and that I was inciting other mothers to do the same.”
Almost two hours after the “conversation”, the woman was released, although her house is still under siege.
“You should be ashamed to mess with a mother, a woman just like your mothers, or where were you born from?”
Another mother of 11J, Niurka Rodríguez García, who had denounced the arrest of Gutiérrez Padrón in her networks, cried out: “You should be ashamed to mess with a mother, a woman just like your mothers, or perhaps where were you born? Enough repression of mistreatment and abuse with family members and do not watch so much, that the day we really want to go out, no one stops us”.
Gutiérrez Padrón’s son, Brusnelvis Cabrera, 21, is sentenced to 10 years in prison for sedition, with evidence that she has always claimed is spurious. During the first trialwhich occurred last March, the image of a young man on a motorcycle who, with the movement of his arm, summoned the protesters, was enough for the Court to convict him, despite the fact that the mother has insistently denied that this was her son : “The boy in the photo has no tattoos on his arm and my son has it full of tattoos.”
The appeal process did not conclude as expected, and the judges only reduced five years of the initial sentence.
María Luisa Fleita’s son, Rolando Vázquez, suffered a similar fate, being sentenced, after the appeal trial, to 12 years in prison (originally the sentence was 21 years). “There is a video in which he is seen crossing the street, going through the crowd, and then continuing on his way. Only because of that image, in which Rolando is not seen joining the protest, they condemned him,” Fleitas said in an interview. with this newspaper last April.
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