Havana/Activist Ienelis Delgado Cué, known as Mambisa Agramontina on her social media profiles, has been on hunger strike since December 31, in the Granja 5 camp in Camagüey. The fact was reported this Monday by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (Ocdh), which added that “a doctor had to come to take his blood pressure given his state of health.”
The activist’s protest, reported the Ocdh, was in response to the authorities preventing her mother, Leticia Cué – former political prisoner – from delivering food to her on the last day of the year in prison. Through a video, published by the observatory, the woman accused that that day the inmates “did not even receive bread for breakfast. They are dying of hunger,” and added that her daughter was already in a punishment cell for protesting.
Ienelis Delgado Cue She has been in that penitentiary center since her violent arrest on April 24, accused of crimes against State Security. “They arbitrarily detained me in my house, violating all my rights, without giving me a search warrant,” he denounced. At that time, she also went on a hunger strike that lasted 12 days, “until instructor Dainer appeared in front of me to tell me that I was accused of crimes against state security,” the activist said in an audio recording.
According to her story, the political police detained her for receiving a “personal package” that someone had sent to another opponent. “They are detaining me because they say that I receive packages from counterrevolutionary organizations,” denounced the dissident, who assured that the package was sealed and she did not know its contents: “I don’t know what it contains.”
The political police arrested her for receiving a “personal package” that someone had sent to another opponent.
During the arrest, his phone and those of his mother and stepfather were confiscated. She was also beaten in the patrol car that took her to the Garrido police unit “by a woman from the special brigade.” She spent 12 days in that police station, during which she maintained a hunger strike and was never informed of the crimes of which she was accused.
Days later, her mother held State Security directly responsible for what could happen to her daughter and expressed her deep concern for Delgado Cué’s children – two minors – “who are suffering from the absence of their mother.”
It is not the first time that the activist has suffered repression from the state apparatus. In 2023 she spent nine months in prison for a crime of contempt, after being detained for a peaceful act: publishing photos wrapped in the Cuban flag. The activist carried out this action to demonstrate her solidarity with the artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (sentenced to five years in prison in 2022), who, in 2019, led the #LaFanderaEsDe todos campaign, weeks after a Law on symbols that strictly regulates their use came into force. Then she was also sent to the Kilo 5 women’s prison, although her release occurred from a work camp known as El Anoncillo, to which she had been transferred.
The hunger strike continues to be, in many cases, “the last resort of people deprived of liberty to report abuses”
The hunger strike continues to be, in many cases, “the last resort of people deprived of their liberty to report abuses and violations of rights,” according to the Cubalex legal advice center, which noted in an analysis published in December that it has become “the last resort, when other instances have already been exhausted.”
During last October and November, the organization said, “more than a dozen Cuban political prisoners began hunger strikes as an extreme protest against various arbitrariness that the State commits against them.”
Cubalex recalled the case of the political prisoner of 11J Yosvany Rosell García Casowho began a hunger strike on October 23 in the Cuba Sí prison, in Holguín, “as a protest against his imprisonment and to demand total isolation within the penitentiary establishment. Weeks later, the opponent was transferred to a hospital, in a critical state of health, and on his 40th day of the strike, he decided to end it.”
These events, he indicated, “are not suicidal acts, but rather a deliberate, rational and political act, where the body becomes the only means of communication available when other means of communication have been closed, as is the Cuban case.”
