Photo: RAMON ESPINOSA/AP/PICTURE ALLIANCE / Deutsche Welle
This Cuban mother has met in Geneva with officials from United Nations human rights rapporteurs to explain the abuses that her son, and she too, have suffered since last year.
“I appreciate the opportunity to be the voice of the mothers and relatives of those who protested on 11-J”, highlights this sports psychologist during her stay in Geneva, from where she insists that her son, Ángel Jesús Véliz Marcano, like many others detained in those protests, he is a political prisoner who “does not have to be in jail”.
Véliz Marcano was arrested on 11 July 2021, one week after participating in the protests in the central city of Camagüey, and was sentenced to six years in prison, which he is currently serving in the Cerámica Roja prison after having spent time in one of the most “feared” prisons on the island.
“At first he was transferred to a high-security prison, Kilo 8, (…) sharing a cell with other protesters with whom he achieved total empathy” until the prison officials, seeing that they were forming a “family ”, they were separated, says the mother.
At least 40 underage demonstrators
Marcano, who has also met with responsible for the NGO for the defense of children’s rights Child Rights Connect to denounce that many of those sentenced are minors, has recounted to experts on fundamental freedoms in Geneva the circumstances of the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of his son, being the first family member who manages to leave Cuba to do so after 11-J.
In the trial of his son, he said, “all the witnesses of the Prosecutor’s Office were from the Ministry of the Interior”, while those presented were not heardfor the defense, and later she herself has also been harassed by the regime and therefore had to leave her job in the training of young Cuban athletes.
State harassment against mothers of protesters
“They coerce me, they intimidate me, they threaten me, they want forcing me to sign things that I refuse to sign… they intend to condemn me, but I believe that a mother has the right to ask for the freedom of her son and to find a way to be heard”, says Marcano, to whom the conviction of her son has led her an activism that he had never sought before.
“I was not interested in politics, but when they touch your son, your reason for living, then I began to look for information, to document myself, and I realized that I had lived in a bubble,” he confesses, and assures that this “awakening” led him to fight for “a Cuba in which justice is served and people do not be forced to leave the country”.
The NGO Observatorio Cubano of Human Rights (OCDH), directed by Alejandro González Raga and who has helped Marcano to travel to Geneva and meet with United Nations bodies, affirms that there are at least 1 in Cuba.024 political sentences, among them 891 related to the popular protests of the 11 July last year.
Mothers and other relatives of prisoners of the 11-J do not currently have an official association that represents them, but they communicate through a Facebook page created by Marcano herself, with more than 5 .000 members.
“I felt the need for us to unite in some way, even if it was through the internet, and there each family member expresses their feelings and their personal experiences,” said Véliz Marcano’s mother, who spent her time in the cell 27 birthday.
Protests criminalized by the regime
The protests of July 2021, highlighted the mother, they took place peacefully at all times “until the government itself, (Cuban) President Miguel Díaz Canel, gave the order to fight and turned them into a total war between brothers ”.
Those who participated in them are “heroes who had the courage to want to show the reality that we Cubans suffer day by day, practically living as slaves and crushed by a boot that barely lets us breathe,” he said.
jov (efe, swissinfo)