Madrid/A new police operation harshly hosts this Wednesday the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), also domicile of its leader, José Daniel Ferrerin the neighborhood of Altamira, in Santiago de Cuba. According to the opponent himself Through its social networksthree young collaborators of the organization, Silenaay Guevara López, Yailín Cala Laurencio and Kevin Alfredo Gámez González, were arrested early.
In addition, said Ferrer, “they tried to stop and used violence” against a pregnant woman, Claudia Virgen Rodríguez Chacón. “Other collaborators have not yet arrived, we fear that they can be detained,” he said.
The opponent accompanied his message from a video that showed one of the state security agents bet in the vicinity of the house, which at one point tried to snatch the mobile from the former political prisoner Roilán Álvarez Rensor, who filmed him. “Are you afraid of the camera, slender?” Asks the activist while the other man moves away from the place.
“From the day those journalists visited us, the regime decreased the intensity of the siege, and we had relative tranquility.”
In his recording, Ferrer explains that on Tuesday of last week they received the visit of three employees of the Reuters agency, a reporter, a cameraman and a photographer. “From the day those journalists visited us, the regime decreased the intensity of the siege, and we had relative tranquility, less arrests, less harassment, less threats,” says the opponent, although they did suffer “attempts to poison or contaminate the food,” while the harassment continued to the collaborators of the social dining room of the UNPACU to threaten them.
One of these volunteers, Josefina Reyes London, gave details of the state security performance in his case in a Video posted on Monday by José Daniel Ferrer. “They wanted me to throw a dust that they were going to give me to food, they wanted me to throw rags in the cup so that the cup was tupped, they wanted me to throw bed bugs in the rooms,” said the woman, who refused to those claims. “I told them no, how I was going to throw things into food when my children also ate, and when there is a small child at home,” he said referring to Ferrer’s son and his wife, Nelva Ortega.
The opponent said he called Reyes, known as Finite in the neighborhood and that he had been a neighbor of the family, to collaborate with the UNPACU as a “good cook” he is. “She is not an opponent,” clarifies the activist, but, “as always happens,” the Political Police try to turn all of his agents. In the case of Reyes, they told her that they would call her “Agent Román” – as her husband was called, already deceased – and would have to do what they told her. “Low as they are, they told him Finita that Román had been their agent, because they become an agent to the Indian Hatuey, when it is convenient to manipulate, press and get other people what they want,” Ferrer ironized.
Reyes also asked him to believe Ferrer and Ortega that activist Fernando Rodríguez Vailont – “twice a political imprisonment for his firmness,” said the UNPACU leader – worked for state security. They threatened to get her out of her house, owned by the State, her and her family.
“I know you, I know you years ago, and I didn’t feel good doing what they wanted,”
The woman confesses to the opponent of her fear that, by making public the complaint, the threats to rerecien, and that she can lose her home and even her children. The woman breaks in crying when saying, heading to Ferrer: “I told them that I could not bite the hand that feeds me, that first, and second, I know you, I know you years ago, and I did not feel good doing what they wanted, and as I felt bad, and I did not want what they were telling me, they started to put myself against you.” The opponent tells him that for that reason they were going to help her already protect “as far as possible, inside and out of Cuba.”
Reyes is precisely one of those interviewed by Reuters, in her Report on UNPACU issued on Tuesday. “I am not hurting anyone to come here to help,” says the woman, who adds that she does not understand political activities.
The British agency, which counts harassment and threats received by the organization’s collaborators, says that “the Cuban government did not respond to the request for comments on the accusations.”
This same Wednesday, Prisoners Defenders (PD) denounced In a statement that the regime has 350 arrests in less than a month in the environment of the UNPACU “to stop the unstoppable humanitarian work of José Daniel Ferrer.”
The organization, in addition to mentioning the case of Josefina Reyes, reviews all the harassment received by the opponent since it was released, at the end of January, as part of an agreement between the regime and the Vatican.
“State security is attacking with indiscriminate and cruel repression of the most vulnerable, people who come to receive help”
“State security is attacking with indiscriminate and cruel repression of the most vulnerable, people who come to receive help,” says PD, which counts that three months, “from the first day that José Daniel Ferrer left prison, on January 16, 2025,” the UNPACU “has distributed 30,503 humanitarian aid services (between breakfasts, foods, dinners and medical care) growing of almost 1,300 people daily, until the Inhuman repression of the regime and the arrests on the beneficiaries would reduce the rhythm of influx of vulnerable people to 500 a day in recent days. ”
The persecution against anyone who has approached the opposition organization in these weeks has included food confiscation, theft directly from money and even the Sexual harassment of collaborators.
Prisoners Defenders remembers in his long report the beginnings of Ferrer’s humanitarian work, in the early 90s and the special period, when he created, along with his brothers Luis Enrique and Ana Belkis – both today in the US – a fishing brotherhood in the town where they resided then, manganese, near the basket reservoir, with the intention of “feeding the maximum of families in the area”.
The initiative, which was successful, suffered the harassment of state security, while the brothers began their political work. Ferrer, involved in the collection of signatures for the Varela project, would be one of the 2003 black spring prisoners who refused to leave Cuba in exchange for their release, in 2011.
Since then, he has not ceased to be the target of the regime, and has suffered more prison enclosures: in 2019 and 2021. “The prison suffered by José Daniel Ferrer in the period between July 11, 2021 and January 16, 2025,” says the NGO based in Madrid, “was the most inhuman suffered by this to date.” The opponent suffered, they continue, “the most adverse continued conditions of which there are news about any prisoner of consciousness in the Western hemisphere in many years.”
