Glenda Corella Céspedes arrived in Canada in 2012, when the Cuban government agreed to her request to leave the country after eight years of waiting. His life in Toronto had gone normally until on March 7 when he decided to return to the Island to attend his brother’s wedding and was met with the refusal of the immigration authorities, who prevented him from getting off the plane that landed at the airport. Franka País from Holguín around 9 at night. The reason? Her empathy with the 9/11 protesters, which led her to be more active in criticizing her regime on social media.
The story is told by the main character herself. Canadian public media CBC News. Corella Céspedes, who was traveling with a friend, Mary Guaragna, had medicines in her suitcase for her mother – a lung cancer patient – and a friend, as well as clothes for her brother’s wedding and the happiness of returning let’s see. She, too, did not lack her Cuban passport under her control, with which she is obliged, by law, to enter the country despite having Canadian nationality.
“I saw that five immigration officers got on the plane and said that everyone could get off except Glenda Corella Céspedes,” he told the chain. “At that moment – adds Guaragna – we looked at each other with a lot of concern. I was as white as a ghost, and Glenda more than me. The Canadians who came out of the plane looked at us as if we were terrorists. We felt horrible,” she recalls.
“At that point we looked at each other with quite a bit of concern. I was as white as a ghost, and Glenda whiter than me. The Canadians coming off the plane were looking at us like we were terrorists.”
One of the officers, according to the account of the two women, left with Corella Céspedes’s passport and, after about 20 minutes, another soldier, apparently of higher rank, came on board and gave the Cuban-Canadian a document in which It said “Denied”, without further explanation.
Guaragna explains that he spoke with the agent to try to understand the situation and attributes his naivety in believing that an understanding could be reached to his Canadian mentality. “What seems to be the problem?” she said to the officer, who replied simply: “She knows what she did, she knows what she did.” “At that point I looked at Glenda, who kind of signaled me not to say anything else.”
Corella Céspedes attributes her problems to a simple “like” on Facebook. At the beginning of the year, Prime Minister Manuel Marrero visited the Gibara hospital in Holguín, where she had worked as a nurse years before. A doctor from the center – apparently well connected with the Communist Party – posted on her networks a video of the musical performance with which they received the president and several users criticized the gesture, considering that they should have claimed the leader for the health situation of the Isla, instead of entertaining him.
Corella Céspedes marked one of those criticisms with a ‘like’ and that’s where it all began. Her parents began receiving warnings from local PCC members, advising them to ask her daughter to stop posting and commenting.
After being refused entry into Cuba, she herself began to receive messages from a person identified as José Manuel Santos who told her: “Follow my advice. You have your parents here and you have nieces, nephews and cousins. Do not put anything else in your wall (of Facebook)”, sent him by WhatsApp on March 29.
“Your ban is for two years, but if you keep sharing things on your wall, they will change it for your whole life. You have your mom here.”
CBC News tried unsuccessfully to contact the Cuban embassy in Canada, which has been closed since February and the Island’s Ministry of the Interior has not answered their calls either. The outlet spoke with the Cuban lawyer residing in the US, Laritza Diversent, who spoke to the chain about how the regime uses immigration “regulations” as a mechanism to control critics.
“Cubans who have deserted while on missions abroad and rafters have been the object of this measure in the past,” he said, adding that since 9/11 – which generated a great wave of solidarity activism in networks – it applies to those who they use cyberspace to disagree.
“Just for screaming for freedom, for screaming we want to eat, completely defenseless people who didn’t have a stick or a stone to defend themselves were attacked by the police”
“Just for screaming for freedom, for screaming we want to eat, completely defenseless people who had neither a stick nor a stone to defend themselves were attacked by the police and by a minority that serves that government to oppress the people,” recalled Diversent. The lawyer explained to the Canadian channel that resolution 105 of the Cuban Ministry of Communications considers any criticism of an official as a cyber attack.
“They have unlimited discretion, there is no judicial supervision,” he adds. “If you are denied entry, there is no way to make a claim in court, and in no way can the family in Cuba start a procedure to go against that decision.” Diversent has not returned to the Island for five years for precisely the same reason and she says that State Security has not stopped putting pressure on her mother, visiting her several times, to convince her to cede her position. .
“The exile who begins to criticize is aware that if he does that he will not be able to return and that is the cost. How then are you going to be able to bring medicine to your family? It is a real dilemma, especially since it is as if they had your family hostage,” he laments. And all in the midst of a huge crisis in which the Island hopes that tourists – with Canadians as the main market – and emigrants refill the state coffers with foreign currency.
Her attitude, despite everything, is not always successful and, in the case of Glenda Corella Céspedes, it has multiplied her activism. She now proclaims her intention not to try to go to Cuba again as long as there is no democracy. “I’m sorry for my mother. I’m sorry for my father, for my sister, for my brother, for my cousin, friends, everyone. But it’s not possible for her to come back.”
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