LAS TUNAS, Cuba. — People in good faith, but not sufficiently aware of the management of Cuban society by the State, have been astonished by the criminalization of the civic protests that occurred in July 2021 (J11) in various cities of the national territory and by the excessive sanctions imposed by the courts on the demonstrators. But even among the best informed, surprise is not uncommon, since one thing is the enunciation of the legal body and another is the spirit of the laws and that of the operators who enforce them.
“The magistrates and judges, in their function of imparting justice, are independent and owe obedience only to the law”, says article 150 of the Constitution. But that is one of the many fictions of the totalitarian State: in the same way that in Cuba a peasant is not free to sell the milk from his cows to whomever he deems best, neither is a magistrate independent in pronouncing a sentence.
Following these patterns of conduct, which bind from children in schools to the most circumspect professors in universities, for weeks, in those places where demonstrations and protests have taken place since July 11, we have seen magistrates and judges impose particularly and uniformly severe sanctions on demonstrators accused of sedition, contempt, assault, resistance, disorderly conduct and other crimes, which are more reminiscent of the clauses of a sergeant enforcing the regulations of a barracks than acting in his role of imparting justice of those who are reputed to be “independent”.
Why are all the sanctions imposed by the courts on those accused of 11J throughout Cuba reminiscent of a pattern cut by the same scissors of a coarse tailor? Well, because that’s how the “administration of justice” works on the Island. The handlers of the laws acted in concert, complying with the “indication” received, which was confessed before the national television cameras. We alerted you to this on this same site after the first arrests occurred in July 2021.
The police were hunting protesters in a raid deployed throughout the Cuban archipelago when on the night of Wednesday, July 14, 2021, they appeared on the television program We make Cuba the Chief Prosecutor of Criminal Proceedings of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR), Lisnay Mederos Torres, and the colonel of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) Moraima Bravet Garofalo, head of the Directorate of Criminal Investigations and Operations. Both reported on the accusations that would be brought against the participants in the protests, some already detained, while others were still in the process of being investigated for their arrest.
Although the prosecutor Mederos Torres assured that the FGR would respect and protect the constitutional rights of the due process that assists the accused, it was the MININT colonel Moraima Bravet Garófalo who that night, involuntarily, leaked that there had already been a decision regarding the measures legal measures to take with the demonstrators and announced the long prison sentences with which we have seen all those incriminated for the 11J demonstrations punished. “The indication we have is greater severity,” the officer said on that occasion.
When the head of the criminal investigation in Cuba assures on television that “the indication we have is greater severity”, she meant that they received the order to prosecute the detainees not only for the crimes established in the Penal Code with greater custodial sentences, but also applying aggravating circumstances that would lead to more severe sanctions. In other words: if several aggravating circumstances concur in an alleged crime or if one of them manifests itself in a very intense way, the court would increase the maximum limit of the foreseen sanction by up to half. Under this maxim, a crime whose maximum sanction would be 10 years, the deprivation of liberty would be increased to 15 years, and in one of 20, it could be transformed into up to 30 years in prison.
The long sentences that we have seen in recent months or weeks, rather than the product of criminal investigations, tax petitions and sentences by magistrates and judges, are the result of an “indication” of the totalitarian State led by the Communist Party. This was announced early by MININT Colonel Moraima Bravet Garófalo when she appeared on television and said: “The indication we have is greater severity.” The sentences had already been announced when the accusations against the 11J demonstrators had not yet formed part of the preparatory phase files in the prosecutor’s offices, much less criminal cases in any court in Cuba.
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