Finds Professor Alina Barbara Lopez Guilty of ‘Disobedience’
Several activists and colleagues of the teacher were detained or harassed in Matanzas and Havana
By 14ymedio
HAVANA TIMES – The Cuban intellectual and historian Professor Alina Bárbara López Hernandez has been found guilty of “disobedience” in the trial to which she was subjected on November 28th in Matanzas. She herself reported it in a Facebook post, in which she also denounces the number of arrests and abuses that State Security has carried out in recent hours. # In addition to the details of the arrest of the writer Jorge Fernández Era, just when he was going with her to the Municipal Court, the professor says that there are two people whose whereabouts are unknown: Mario Ginés González and Ilonka Amuchastegui.
Both, says the historian, whose source is the father of her daughters, managed to get to the court, but when they tried to enter — “since it was said that it was a public hearing” — they were taken to the police station.
The journalist Boris González Arenas, the historian Alexander Hall, the researcher Dmitri Prieto and the activist Raymar Aguado, for their part, are under police surveillance stationed in front of their homes.
Aguado himself had explained in a Facebook post that he was ordered to appear this Monday at the Central Havana Police station, at the corner of Zanja and Dragones, “for the purpose of being interviewed for committing a possible crime,” according to the summons. In his post, he took the opportunity to send his “support” to Alina Bárbara López Hernández.
“Another mockery of the Rule of Law and the 2019 Constitution,” lamented Alexander Hall when he saw his home under siege at dawn. Prieto, for his part, claims that the agents threatened him on Monday with charging him with a “crime of disobedience” if he left his house, in Santa Cruz del Norte, Mayabeque.
As for González Arenas, says his wife, Juliette Isabel Fernández Estrada, he has been suffering police harassment all this week, “to prevent him from free movement outside the home.” And before this Monday, Saturday, seven years after the death of Fidel Castro.
Likewise, journalist Neife Rigau has had her mobile data taken away, as reported by Henry Constantín, also due to the trial of the Matanzas historian. “Regime with fear, a lot of fear,” pointed out Constantín, the director of La Hora de Cuba.
Due to this raid, hours before his trial, this Monday, López Hernández expressed a particular “I accuse” against the State Security organs “as those most responsible for the abuses and illegalities that are committed daily in my country against a defenseless citizen who is prevented from exercising her rights.”
The “true cause of so much repression and precautions is fear,” she asserts in her text, where she “reassures” the authorities with sarcasm: “I have never called on anyone to demonstrate or create disorders. Unlike you, I believe in the individual and ethical responsibility of the people.”
More than a dozen organization demanded that the Cuban authorities annul the judicial process against the professor, whom they describe as a “recognized historian trained in Marxism and committed to the causes of the left.”
For the platforms Cuba Siglo 21, the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, Cuido 60 and the Observatory of Cultural Rights, among other signatories of a document last October , the cause of the siege against the teacher has been her exercise of the “right to free expression and freedom of academic research.”
Prisoners Defenders spoke in the same vein , calling the accusation against López Hernandez “false.”
The trial, initially scheduled for November 16 and later postponed, is the latest episode of harassment that includes a ban on leaving the country and that began last year, when the event for young artists The Worst Generation was censored. López Hernández was going to preface a book that would have the same title and that the regime also prevented from being carried out.
She herself reported the harassment, but stayed on social media. After receiving several requests from State Security to be questioned, she presented a “formal complaint and annulment action against the official summons” to the Matanzas Provincial Prosecutor’s Office . With this, the teacher managed to get State Security to annul the summons.
Three months later, inspired by the Matanzas action, Jorge Fernández Era presented a similar claim, of nullity for violation of the Criminal Procedure Law, after receiving a summons from the political police, and did not obey the summons.
The writer said at that time that the officer who approached him expressly reminded him not to be inspired by the case of Alina Bárbara López Hernández, warning him that “Matanzas is not Havana.”
Last April, López Hernández was detained for several hours by State Security after protesting another detention of Jorge Fernández Era in the same Freedom Park.
After being released, she recounted in a long Facebook post the details of her arbitrary detention for exercising “a constitutional right in a country without political rights,” and announced that on every 18th day she would demonstrate peacefully.
Her requests would be four: “a democratically elected National Constituent Assembly to draft a new Constitution applicable in all its parts”; “that the State not ignore the critical situation of the elderly, retirees, pensioners and families who are in extreme poverty”; “freedom for political prisoners without mandatory exile”; and “cessation of harassment of people who exercise their freedom of expression.”
Translated por Translating Cuba
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