The Cuban regime has already adopted the repressive pattern of codifying expressions of dissent on social networks.
MIAMI, United States. – The Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Villa Clara requested a six-year prison sentence for Lázaro Manuel Hernández Reyes, a 33-year-old Cuban accused of “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “disrespect” for messages published on Facebook, according to a prosecutor’s petition dated November 2025 to which the newspaper had access. 14ymedio.
According to the document, the events occurred at different times in 2024, when Hernández Reyes, a resident of Ranchuelo, created a “false profile” on the social network “to incite his neighbors to take public roads through acts of violence to put an end to the country’s political system.” The Prosecutor’s Office also attributed claims to the municipal government to avoid “prolonged cuts in electrical service.”
The accusation specifically criticizes two publications. In one, the accused spread an edited image of the “hanging” ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel along with a text that said: “The solution.” In the other, he urged the population to gather in front of the headquarters of the Ranchuelo Communist Party to ask for their rights “as a people.”
Hernández Reyes has remained in provisional prison since September 2025 and, from there, his cousin Ernest Cañellas reported to 14ymedio that “work is happening.” “He tells us that it’s not that they give him little food, but that the food is in bad condition, spoiled, with bugs, with worms. He has lost a lot of weight,” said Cañellas. The relative added that his health has deteriorated and that Hernández Reyes is waiting for a leg operation, “not serious”, “which could not be done because he was imprisoned.”
The Cuban regime has already adopted the repressive pattern of codifying expressions of dissent on social networks. At the end of December, Alexander Verdecia Rodrígueza member of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), received a seven-year prison sentence for “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “instigation to commit a crime” solely for his Facebook posts.
In March 2025, a court He imposed seven years in prison on Alexander Mario Fábregasformer prisoner of 11J, for uploading videos to social networks in which, according to the authorities, he questioned the Cuban State system and attacked Miguel Díaz-Canel.
