And now… Cuba is imprisoning children! Eight months after the unprecedented demonstrations of mid-July, the first convictions are beginning to rain. Monday, February 14, a first group of 20 Cubans was sentenced for sedition by the court of Holguín, in the east of the country, to sentences ranging from seven to twenty years of detention. Among these ordinary citizens condemned to rot in the tropical gulag: five minors aged 16 and 17. Their crime? Having protested peacefully, on July 11, to cries of “Freedom!” to demand the end of the Castro dictatorship. And this, in a context of social exhaustion that affects above all the poorest, in the forefront of which are the Afro-descendants, exhausted by shortages of all kinds – food, medicine, electricity.
“These convictions violate the United Nations’ International Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet signed by Havana”, is indignant, in Madrid, Javier Larrondo, of the association prisoner defenders, which defends Cuban prisoners – political (there are almost a thousand of them) or not. Small consolation: some teenagers could see their sentences commuted to community service and house arrest. In any case, their professional horizon will be obstructed: the regime persecutes elements considered “asocial” by blocking their access to studies and jobs.
A police car overturned during a protest on July 11, 2021 in Havana, Cuba.
afp.com/YAMIL LAGE
The crackdown is reaching a new peak, much higher than Pico Turquino (1,974 meters) in the Sierra Maestra. “In 2003, the sentencing of 75 opponents to long sentences caused an international outcry, continues Larrondo, but today, the legal proceedings strike ten times as many people: 790 people in all, including 55 teenagers.” The craziest thing is that they are not even political activists, as in 2003. The condemned are simple demonstrators. “Led by the mediocre apparatchik Miguel Diaz-Canel, the power knows that it has lost contact with the people, notes for its part the historian and specialist in Castroism Elizabeth Burgos. From then on, it has no other way than to repress the population very harshly so that it does not occur to him to start again. She adds: “Under Fidel Castro, things were more subtle, because he knew how to use rhetoric to ease tensions and silence critics.”
The dictatorship is counting on a weighty ally: the silence of the international community. “In diplomatic matters, the two most influential players vis-à-vis Cuba are the European External Action Service [dirigé par le haut représentant européen Josep Borrell, il conduit la politique extérieure de l’UE] and the Spanish government, resumes Javier Larrondo. The first only issued a polite statement at the end of July, after the arrest of thousands of demonstrators. And the second says nothing, because the leaders of the extreme left party Podemos [équivalent de la France insoumise de Jean-Luc Mélenchon, NDLR] participate in the government of socialist Pedro Sanchez and admire Cuba.” At most, the international community ventures to criticize Nicaragua and Venezuela, two allied countries of Havana where repression is also going well. But Cuba, No. The Castro revolution is sacred…
Axel Gylden