The young activist Rainel Rodríguez, 17, was expelled from the Carlos Marx Vocational Pre-University Institute of Exact Sciences (IPVCE), in Matanzas, where he was studying. The complaint was published this Saturday by the Academic Freedom Observatory (OLA).
The expulsion comes after the young man suffered threats, defamation, physical violence and political discrimination within the educational center by the teachers. According to OLA, the director of the IPVCE Daneysi Acosta orchestrated several plans to expel him permanently from the school.
Finally, they justified the expulsion due to an altercation that the boy had with a chemistry teacher, Luis Ángel Santana Pereira, to whom he raised his voice. Previously, said teacher had given Rodríguez blows to the chest.
Rainel had made public his positions against Communism and had even managed the Lunatic Debates channel, where he encouraged other young people to be interested in politics and question the system in Cuba. Rodríguez was also a founder of the Alianza Juvenil Libertaria. However, what placed him under the media spotlight was that he joined the civic march of November 15, 2021.
At that time, when he was only 15 years old, he was arrested and threatened with being confined in a juvenile center for his political views. At the request of his family, the boy stopped his activism on social networks and focused on his studies, but he continued to be harassed by teachers and the political police.
His brother Rodniel Rodríguez, commented that in the IPVCE the boy had been harassed since he entered and that they called him “the spot in the center.” He also denounced that the sanction that they communicated to him at the beginning was that he would be separated from the classroom for a few days; and then, without further ado, they told him that he had been definitively expelled.
“Currently, the young man was transferred to an urban pre-university, but he has not been able to take the exams corresponding to two evaluative cuts, so, presumably, he will lose this course,” OLA points out.
Expulsions for political reasons in Cuban study centers are a constant from 1959 to today. OLA has documented dozens of cases of teachers and students deprived of their right to work and/or education for dissenting or having a critical position towards the government.
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