MIAMI, United States. – The exiled Cuban playwright Yunior García Aguilera denounced this Wednesday, during his speech at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights, the repression in Cuba and asked for the freedom of the two young creators of the YouTube channel El4ticodetained in Holguín.
“I have been lucky, very lucky. I am alive and I am free, that is why I prefer to talk about those who are still inside Cuba, trapped in the belly of a much darker and much more bitter fish. A few days ago, two young people in Holguín, the city where I was born, were arrested. (…) These young people who are imprisoned in Cuba are called Ernest [Ricardo Medina] and Kamil [Zayas Pérez]. His crime, his terrible crime was having a YouTube channel called El4tico,” García Aguilera said during his intervention.
And then he added: “They spoke of freedom and democracy, two words considered subversive in Cuba. They also had more followers than the ‘president’ of the country, although that is not a merit, anyone in Cuba has more followers than Miguel Díaz-Canel, who became president with a single vote, the only vote that matters in Cuba: the vote of Raúl Castro.”
At another point in his speech, the playwright referred to the events of November 27, 2020, when hundreds of people stood in front of the Ministry of Culture in Havana to demand an end to the harassment against the members of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and the end of censorship. “The regime treated us as if we were worse than a pandemic. They accused me of being a CIA agent,” he said.
Regarding the historic demonstrations of July 11, 2021, he recalled that hundreds of thousands of Cubans went out to protest in the streets and that Díaz-Canel “gave a combat order against his own people.”
In closing his speech, the playwright asked the international community to “understand that inaction also kills, that looking the other way is taking sides, that it is time to support the people in Cuba and not the regime, not the Government, not the dictatorship.” And he added: “People are screaming for change.”
García Aguilera went into exile in Spain after calling for a public protest in November 2021.
