Every March 8, the official press is filled with female faces wielding rifles, standing in front of a classroom or directing a state company, but nothing is said about political prisoners. The number of Cuban women imprisoned for their activism grew significantly after the July 11 protests. Today we remember eight of them, the forgotten ones from the official celebration for Women’s Day.
Earlier this month, activist Sayli Navarro received bitter news. After being prosecuted for the alleged crimes of public disorder, attack and contempt, this 35-year-old woman from Matanzas was sentenced to 8 years in prison. A member of the Ladies in White and the Cuba Decide platform, Navarro’s “crime” was to demand on July 12, 2021, in front of the Perico municipality police station, the immediate release of those detained the previous day.
The blow is doubly hard for the dissident’s family, since her father, former Black Spring prisoner Félix Navarro, one of the few convicted in the case of the 75 in March 2003 who refused to leave the Island, was also tried in the same case and sentenced to nine years behind bars. Sayli Navarro has spent almost two decades of her life experiencing repression firsthand, first because she is the daughter of an opponent and now because of her own activism.
Sayli Navarro has spent almost two decades of her life experiencing repression firsthand, first because she is the daughter of an opponent and now because of her own activism
Yudinela Castro was not arrested on July 11, she did not even go out on the street that day because her health is delicate. But this little woman, who suffers from leukemia from which she has relapsed on more than one occasion, had her most precious things taken from her in the days after those popular demonstrations. Her son, the young Rowland Jesús Castillo Castro, was arrested for participating in the protests and now faces a 12-year prison sentence.
At the end of last February, Castro was detained by the political police to try to stop her activism. She was transferred to the 100 and Aldabó prison in Havana and charged with contempt, according to several activists. Her arrest seeks to prevent the outrage of the 11J mothers from crystallizing into a protest movement that puts the regime in check, as once happened with the Ladies in White.
Two almost identical faces were seen among the defendants in the Court of Placetas, Villa Clara, last September. They were the Lisdany and Lidianis Rodríguez Isaac sisters, whom the Prosecutor’s Office asked for a ten-year prison sentence for their participation in the 11J protests. These 22-year-old twins have been in the Guajamal prison, a precautionary measure imposed while they are being processed for the alleged crimes of public disorder, contempt and two counts of assault.
Liadinis’s daughter, only three years old, thinks her mother has gone to work at a place where they make sweets and cookies. She waits for her every day, while her grandmother makes up stories to delay her return. The mother of the two women, along with her triplet sister, assures that the most “serious” thing the sisters did was shout “homeland and life” in the streets of their community.
The letters are not saved from repression either. At the end of January, in San José de las Lajas, Mayabeque, the prosecution requested 15 years in prison for the writer María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez. Garrido’s husband, Michel Valladares Cala, described the trial as a “circus”, in which “they have not told a single truth, a pure lie, a pure contradiction between them,” he said, alluding to the actions of the prosecutors and their witnesses.
The writer has been prosecuted for the crimes of attack, contempt, resistance, public disorder and organization to commit a crime. Those responsible for Ilíada Ediciones, where her book Examination of Time was published, have promoted the initiative that the money collected from the sale of the volume will go entirely to support the author, “who long ago became an activist for the defense in Cuba of the human rights and women’s rights,” the editors point out.
The Beirut family was especially shaken that day of July 12. Exen Beirut took to the streets of La Güinera, in Havana, to accompany the demands for freedom in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the Cuban capital. In the days that followed, the police unfolded the hunt for protesters, house by house, and arrested him. His sister Katia Beirut and his father Fredi protested the arrest on public roads and also charged with them.
Since then, the young woman has been imprisoned and although the trial against her and her father was held in December in the People’s Municipal Court of October 10 last December, they are still waiting for a sentence. The Prosecutor’s request amounts to 20 years of deprivation of liberty. The brothers’ mother feels that the Cuban regime seeks to “overthrow” and “destroy” her family.
The house has become the prison of Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, a 17-year-old girl sentenced to eight months in prison for participating in the 11J protests.
The house has become the prison of Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, a 17-year-old girl sentenced to eight months in prison for participating in the 11J protests. Arrested for her actions on that day, her case became an example of the arrest of minors in Cuba and international pressure managed to get her to return to her home on July 24 under house arrest.
The second-year accounting student at the Andrés Luján polytechnic school in San Miguel del Padrón spent several days in the Western Women’s Prison, known as El Guatao, and must serve eight months of her sentence. But it will take her much longer to forget the violence she suffered the day of her arrest. “The officers grabbed me so hard to get me into the patrol car that they hurt me, they treated me like I was anything,” she recalls.
Yunaiky de la Caridad López Rodríguez, 24, was picked up at her home ten days after the 11J demonstrations, when she took to the streets in the municipality of Diez de Octubre, in Havana. For two days, she was missing, and her mother, Niurka Rodríguez García, searched for her from prison to prison.
Also imprisoned in El Guatao, López Rodríguez is one of the few women convicted of sedition, in a trial held on January 31, to 17 years in prison.
None of these eight names will be repeated this Tuesday in the celebrations that take place in state entities. They are the women excluded from headlines and microphones. They are the Cuban women who have paid a high price for exercising their civic right to protest.
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