Processed in Cuba

The protests last July in several Cuban cities transmitted an unprecedented message on the island in the last 62 years.

For the first time, the protest of a significant percentage of its population was made public, or tried to be made public, without fear of being branded a traitor to the country for expressing their disagreement.

What persisted was the fear of repression by the regime, and it has already arrived.

The Government has begun the trials that will affect up to 790 people, mostly young people, for participating in the protests.

The marches began in the small town of San Antonio de los Baños and spread to more than 60 cities to show the weariness of a population subjected to all kinds of hardship for decades.

They were mostly peaceful demonstrations, but the Government responded with extreme harshness.

The government's explanations about the prosecutions represent the latest act in a disproportionate and surely ineffective escalation of repression.

The Attorney General's Office maintains that the protesters "attacked the constitutional order and the stability of the socialist state."

In most cases, the sentences he asks for are very high: hundreds of people can be sentenced to between six and 15 years in prison, and several dozen, accused of sedition, face between 20 and 30 years.

Those sentences are nonsense.

The Cuban government wants to show that new protests will not be tolerated, and its underlying aspiration is to punish others for potential protests, despite the foreseeable continuation of the deterioration of living conditions.

The harshness of an embargo that has just turned 60, intensified during the Donald Trump Administration and sustained under the same terms by Joe Biden, continues to have devastating effects, but behind the social outbreak lurks a deep popular unease.

Sending hundreds of young people to jail to contain the demonstrations of discontent only denies the problem, postpones the possibility of solutions and reveals, once again, the controlling and oppressive obstinacy of the Executive.

Dissent is growing on the island and the right to express it, contained in the Cuban Constitution itself, is inalienable.

There are many who inside and outside the country ask the Government to abandon criminal prosecution as a political weapon and open up to a dialogue with critical sectors.

The trials already started have all the components of abuse of power and manifest lack of proportionality.

Its development will only bring more frustration and more sterile pain.