Cuban authorities have removed the crime of sedition, among others that they use for political purposes, to threaten those who promote or participate in massive protests in Cuba. that endanger the regime and its control institutions. Officials from the Ministry of the Interior and officials from the Government’s Justice apparatus appeared this Wednesday in the propaganda program We make Cubabroadcast on television, which is often echoed by other official media to defend the image of the Police and restrict the right to free expression and demonstration.
Colonel Hugo Morales Karell, second head of the General Directorate of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR), accused alleged terrorists based in the United States of urging attacks against authority. According to the officer, the objective is for the Police to “have an excessive response, capitalize on that reaction to publish it on social networks, and thus try to demonstrate a failed Government and false police brutality.”
Morales tried to counter the frequent complaints of abuse of power and violence carried out by police against unarmed citizens and enrolled them in supposed “unconventional war plans with which the enemy seeks to generate a pretext that allows them to continue accusing Cuba.”
For his part, the president of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme People’s Court, Otto Molina Rodríguez, said that from social networks there are calls to alter public order, to attack the Police and to depose public institutions.
For this last case, he threatened the use of crime of sedition already applied to protesters of the historic protests of July 11, 2021 (11J) and punishable by up to 30 years of deprivation of liberty, life imprisonment and the death penalty “if the crime is committed in exceptional situations, disasters or affects the security of the State.”
Meanwhile, Colonel Morales Karell stated that The Cuban police forces have training in self-defense and driving techniques that allow them to reduce the person without having to use lethal means for control.which contradicts the actions of the uniformed man who killed a 11J protester in La Güinera, Havana.
Of all the popular protests that shook Cuba between July 11 and 13, 2021, one of those that received the most violent repression was the one that occurred in the afternoon of July 12 in La Güinera, where Diuvis Laurencio Tejeda, of 36 years old, he died almost instantly from a bullet that passed through his lung and reached his heart.
In these events, apart from Yoel Misael Fuentes García, a 16-year-old minor who was shot and documented by DIARIO DE CUBA, two more people were injured by police bullets.
The colonel who intervened in We make Cuba He said that, since their time at the academies, police officers on the Island learn as a principle that “you must have rationality when acting with the individual.”
However, Second Lieutenant Yoennis Pelegrín Hernández, the police officer who shot Laurencio Tejeda and three other people, who abandoned all rationality in his actions, was not charged because the Prosecutor’s Office considered that he acted “in legitimate defense.”
The 15th of July, four days after the outbreak of the most significant protests that have occurred in Cuba since 1959the spokesman for the regime Humberto López, announced in the same program We make Cubathat Those arrested in the demonstrations could be charged with the crimes of public disorder, instigation to commit a crimerobbery with force, resistance, attack, injuries, contempt, property damage and spread of epidemics. Days after The regime’s Attorney General’s Office took the crime of “sedition” out of its sleeve.
At least 158 people were charged with this crime, of which 14 were minors who at the time of arrest were between 16 and 17 years old. Another 37 were between 18 and 20 years old.
Given the controversy generated by the accusation of a political crime such as sedition, which has led to sentences of up to 30 years in prison, and the complaints of its unsustainability, the Prosecutor’s Office withdrew it from 11 of the accused minors and 14 from young people between 18 and 20 years old.
