Protest against the Government in Havana, Cuba, on July 11, 2021. ALEXANDRE MENEGHINI (Reuters)
Everything will depend on the day of judgment.
If Jonathan Torres Farrat, 17, says before the Havana Provincial Court that he is sorry, that he effectively retracts anything he has done, any little thing, he will be released from prison now and not at 25, when his son newborn is the same age as your sentence.
This is the message that the lawyer has let his mother know, so that she in turn can send it to him in prison.
It is the night of March 21 and Bárbara Farrat is rocking in an armchair in the living room of her house, located on Calzada de 10 de Octubre, while outside her there are several agents who do not allow her to go out on the street.
At 8:23 PM she starts a live video on Facebook in which she says: “My name is Bárbara Farrat Guillén, I am the mother of the minor Jonathan Torres Farrat,
With an obvious rage that she has learned to contain, her 33-year-old skin full of furrows, her tattooed eyebrows, her hair braided and dyed red from the middle to the ends, Bárbara has become a familiar face to Cubans, as the mother of one of the minors detained during the popular protests of July 11, the largest that have occurred on the island in more than six decades since the triumph of the revolution.
Until then she was a manisera and her husband too.
For years they both roasted peanut kernels, made cones with sheets of paper, prepared, according to demand, salted or candied peanuts.
“Everything was sold here in my neighborhood.
I had a good clientele,” she says.
After the persecution of the Cuban authorities, she lives basically on aid and the pension that she receives for her status as an HIV-positive patient.
Days after that unique social outbreak throughout the island, in which thousands of people participated, Bárbara, who had never been involved in any type of political resistance against the Government, openly declared herself a human rights activist.
"Today I declare myself an activist, because this government destroys families, this government does not believe in her people," she was heard saying on Facebook.
Everything that the Government has stopped since last July is what Bárbara has ended up being.
She a dissident.
Since that date, the parents of those detained in the protests - most of them very young - have been divided into those who prefer not to file a complaint because they consider that this way they will not bother their children in prison;
who have publicly apologized on national television and lied in order to be released or left alone,
and those who, like Bárbara, have decided to denounce the state of injustice unleashed against the protesters.
Barbara understands both perfectly.
“I don't think the best solution is to keep quiet, but they are parents.
They're just parents,” she says.
Since Jonathan has been detained in the Jovenes de Occidente prison in Havana, known as Manto Negro, Bárbara has gone on hunger strikes, has given up taking her HIV treatment, has called fasting for political prisoners, has denounced cases of other mothers of minors detained after the protests, she herself has been detained by the police, harassed, mistreated and threatened with exile or denying her son visits to the prison, the most important thing she has right now.
These visits are naturally sad.
Sometimes Farrat attends, sometimes her husband and sometimes Jonathan's partner and her son.
Jonathan is the father of a baby who was born on October 27, five months after he entered prison.
Farrat requested that Jonathan could go to the maternity hospital to identify his son, but he was denied.
He has not been able to register it with his surnames either.
The day they met, the baby left the hospital and went straight to jail, and Jonathan couldn't stop crying.
The officers allow him to hold him on visiting days for the duration of the stay.
The rest of the relatives can only give him a hug when they arrive.
Bárbara Farrat Guillén and her son Jonathan Torres, who was arrested during the protests in Cuba, in 2021. RRSS
In Bárbara's last meeting with her son, Jonathan had learned of the prosecutor's request for eight years in prison for participating in the demonstration that began in the municipality of San Antonio de los Baños, and which spread through several territories of the island.
He is accused of the crimes of public disorder, attack and spread of epidemics.
Farrat was carrying a message for his son from the lawyer, the notice that his immediate release depended on his repentance on trial day.
Jonathan's response was precise: “I have nothing to regret.
If I repented, my father might be dead."
On July 11, 2021, Jonathan turned 17 years old.
While Bárbara was at home preparing “something delicious for food”, fried plantains, yucca with mojo, what she likes to eat the most, her son went out to look for her father when he learned that he had broken out a demonstration in the neighborhood.
Barbara still says that her son did not come out to demonstrate.
It was her birthday.
He has explained it to the police, to State Security, to the lawyer.
But the guards charged with him.
"I thought that since he is a boy he was going to say that he was sorry, but he taught me a lesson," Barbara is heard saying in her last live broadcast.
“To the point that I looked at him and apologized and told him that he was right, that he had nothing to regret.
He is 17 years old.
Every day he surprises me more”.
The date of Jonathan's trial is unknown at this time.
"It can take the same one month, five months, as long as they want," says Bárbara.
Since the social outbreak, Cuban courts have held trials of 519 people, out of a total of 1,443 detainees, according to updated statistics from the Justice 11J group, made up of citizens who independently came together to track down names, ages, race or place of residence of the people detained after the protests, in the absence of official, complete and transparent information from the island's authorities.
Although data on these trials have been slowly coming to light.
Last week, the Supreme Court of Cuba (TSC) announced the sentences against 129 Cubans who participated in the demonstrations in Havana and who were accused of theft and sedition: 31 of them were sentenced to between 20 and 30 years. of prison, 25 to between 15 and 19 years in prison and 48 to between 10 and 14 years.
One defendant was acquitted, and another received a four-year sentence of "correctional labor without internment."
The military trials and exemplary sentences of up to 30 years in prison have been the greatest lesson to the protesters, their families and Cubans in general.
They are a direct message of what could happen if someone dares to take to the streets again.
“The lawyer did not want to be part of the circus”
From December 20 to 23, the trial of Walnier Luis Aguilar was held, who was notified on March 16 that he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sedition, the crime for which the highest penalties have been imposed and that, according to with the authorities, for those who alter "the constitutional order established in the country" and put "the security of the State at risk."
“Since I don't have a lawyer, the sentence was given to me by my son.
The lawyer abandoned us at the trial, because he didn't want to be part of the circus they were putting together.
He threw the papers away and told me that he couldn't defend me.
I didn't understand it at the time, but later I did, because the trials were staged.
You couldn't make a defense, you couldn't show the photos of the beatings that they gave to the protesters, ”says Walnier's father, Wilber Aguilar García.
At the time the protests broke out, her son had gone to buy malangas at a stall located on Calzada de La Güinera, one of the neighborhoods in Havana where more people have been prosecuted for demonstrating and the place where he died from a shot by police Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, 36, the only death officially recognized by Cuban authorities.
Walnier Luis Aguilar accompanied by his daughters, he was notified on March 16 of this year, that he was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sedition.
“I have official testimony that the judge who passed the sentence began to cry when everyone left.
She could not resist the pain because she knows that the injustice that is being committed is great.
The judge started crying after the trial was over!” Wilber said in one of her many videos on Facebook, where she denounced the situation of her son and other political prisoners.
Walnier, who has cognitive problems, served 22 years in prison a few days ago.
He is black, tall, stocky.
In the photos, he seems happy with his two daughters, very small but who keep track of when he has to visit his father, and they have been able to detect the moment when the family prepares the bag of food to go to jail.
“I miss the family togetherness,” says Wilber.
“Many things are at stake here, here is the separation of a father and a son, the separation of a mother and her son, of a wife from her husband and from her daughters.
They have destroyed a family.”
Due to the complaints he constantly makes about the situation of his son and other prisoners on social networks, Wilber has been threatened by the Cuban political police.
“I have been through a lot of harassment, intimidation, but I have not bowed down.
They have harassed many parents, lawyers, people are afraid.
But there is no law in this world that can tell me that I cannot defend my son.”
For the day Walnier turned 22, he asked his father to buy him a
cake
and sing congratulations to him.
There is a video where the whole family appears and background music that plays: “Happy birthday.
Happy Birthday".
Will there be amnesty?
If on Tuesday, March 22, Niurka Rodríguez García received a call from prison, it meant that her daughter, Yunaiky de la Caridad Linares, had ended the hunger strike that began when she learned that she had been sentenced to 14 years in prison for participating in the protests that took place in the Havana neighborhood known as Toyo's Corner.
She got the call.
That was a relief.
The police charged Yunaiky not on July 11, but on the 21st, when a State Security officer asked her 62-year-old grandmother to allow him to speak with her.
"He said he was bringing her quickly, that she was just to talk, and I'm still waiting for her," says her mother.
The trial of Yunaiky and 32 other protesters took place at the end of January, behind closed doors, with the access of only one family member and without the press being allowed to enter.
Days after the trial, the mother reported on Facebook that Yunaiky had regretted getting on a police patrol as a protest in his neighborhood, where there were confrontations between soldiers and civilians and where shots were reported.
However, the 24-year-old made it clear to the judge that she did not regret having gone out to ask for freedom in a peaceful march.
His statements were enough for the authorities to prohibit visits to the prison and the bag of food every week.
“Why?” the mother asked herself then in a post on Facebook.
"What she did?
Who did she kill?
They are retaliating against them and their relatives.
Get involved with everything except the food, because there is not enough good food to take away what we relatives bring them.”
Niurka's life has changed since her daughter was taken prisoner.
He doesn't sleep well.
She spends her time thinking about how to get her out of that place.
"I see her strong and firm in her ideals," she says now, that she has been allowed visits and that she can see her one day a week in the Western Women's Prison, known as El Guatao.
Niurka Rodríguez García (left) and her daughter Yunaiky de la Caridad Linares, Yunaiky was sentenced to 14 years in prison for participating in the protests in Cuba.RRSS
Yunaiky is also charged with the crime of sedition.
According to former Cuban judge Frank Ajete, this crime no longer finds a place in modern legal systems.
“It is an outdated crime, what happens is that justice tends to go much slower than society.
The Cuban is a criminal code that dates back to 1986. The crime of sedition has been very useful to the Cuban authorities in these circumstances, it has very high punishments, very strong punishments, it has served the power to act within a truculent legality ", He says.
“Then, I think, those sentences will be commuted because there is a lot of international pressure, and the government will wash its face.
If tomorrow the president says that he is going to amnesty some prisoners, it remains as an act of benevolence, but with the reminder that next time he may not be.
On the day of the trial of the Toyo protesters, several relatives of the defendants were expelled from the Diez de Octubre Court for applauding what one of the defendants had said in his defense.
Then many who protested along with other activists on the outskirts of the place were detained at the 11th Station of San Miguel del Padrón.
Yunaiky's relatives were released after his grandmother fainted.
"The trial was a farce," says her mother.
“And they knew everything from the first moment.
They already knew what to do.”
As a result of the injustices committed in the framework of these trials, part of civil society has dedicated itself to locating the faces and names of some of the judges and prosecutors involved.
To these complaints, the National Union of Jurists of Cuba warned that anyone who tries to subvert justice will be punished with "the full weight of the Law."
A request for 18 years in prison for shouting 'The people are hungry'
Currently, 759 participants in the July 11 protests are being held in Cuban prisons, which erupted in the midst of a pandemic that has left more than 8,000 deaths, a collapse of the already deteriorated health system, and a shortage aggravated by the non-arrival of foreign tourists. due to health restrictions.
As a breeding ground for the protests, there is also greater access to the Internet, the history of political resistance such as the San Isidro Movement or with a song like
Patria y Vida
, which served as an anthem for the protesters the day they threw themselves into the streets. streets.
Among many others, Yoan de la Cruz, 26, the person who made the first live broadcast of the protests in Cuba, who has just received a six-year prison sentence, remains in prison.
The sisters Angélica and María Cristina Garrido, sentenced to three and seven years, respectively.
Eloy Bárbaro Cardoso Pedroso, 18, who is being asked for 15 years in prison, whose wife has said that in the trial the authorities did not even know how to recognize who had participated in the march or who had or had not thrown a stone.
The sisters Lisdiany and Lisdany Rodríguez, from Placetas, Santa Clara, who are asked for eight years in prison.
The graduate in Mathematics and Computing Samuel Pupo Martínez, from Cárdenas, whose tax request is 18 years old.
The three children of Elizabeth León,
two of which the Prosecutor's Office asks for 20 years in prison.
Teenager Brandon David Becerra, with an 18-year-old tax petition for yelling that "the people are hungry."
Rowland Jesús Castillo, 18, whose prosecutor's request is 23 years in prison.
His mother, sick with cancer, does not know how to deal with so much.
There are many more names, with ages and faces.
Most of those who are still in prison or have received high sentences come from slums and from families who struggle to fill the bag every week.
These families are accompanied by a part of organized civil society, which has been willing since the arrests to help with the purchase of food.
The family of prisoner Andy García is the main promoter of the
Help for the brave of 11J
project , which delivers bags of food and personal hygiene to political prisoners, a kind of oasis in the midst of the generalized crisis that the country is going through.
Relatives of Alexei Martínez Rojas, detained during the protests in Cuba, in an image published on the Facebook page of 'Help the brave of 11J'.RRSS
Several international organizations and governments have denounced the political trials of those detained as a result of the protests.
Faced with any question, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has given an answer: “Cuba is a sovereign State, responsible for defending its security and sovereignty.
She is accountable to no one but her people.
Criminal proceedings are carried out under the observance of the principle of legality”, he has indicated.
The president, the same one who gave the order to stop any demonstration, assured at the end of last year that in Cuba "there are no political prisoners."
When Bárbara Farrat, Jonathan's mother, talks about the country she wants, she says: “A Cuba without Díaz-Canel.
Where you can express yourself, you can defend the rights of your son, that they do not put you in jail for telling the truth, that the police do not harass you.
I wish an improvement for the Cuban people, that Cubans do not have to emigrate to have decent housing, to have food in the cold.
And a mother's greatest duty is to make her boy a good boy.
It's not because he's my kid, but I think I made it."
Subscribe here to the EL PAÍS América newsletter and receive all the key information on current affairs in the region