What does it mean to be the mother or wife of a political prisoner in Cuba?

Ailex Marcano Fabelo cries every time he talks about his son, imprisoned in a Camagüey jail for going out to demonstrate in the protests of July 11, 2021 in Cuba. Liset Fonseca, whose son is imprisoned in the province of Mayabeque for the same reason, finds her voice cracking.

“Our lives became total agony,” he told the police by phone. voice of america Marcano Fabelo, referring to the imprisonment of his son Jesús Véliz Marcano, 28 years old and sentenced to six years in prison after being accused of public disorder.

Marcano said that after the protests, she resigned from her job as a psychologist, which she had worked “for almost 30 years” at the Provincial Center for Sports Medicine, an organization where she completed an internationalist mission in Venezuela.

His son Jesús is a physical education teacher and a former archery athlete, and since he was arrested he has gone through six prisons.

Saily Núñez, from Güines, in the western province of Mayabeque, spent almost a year traveling more than 100 kilometers to the province of Matanzas, where they located her husband, Maikel Puig Bergolla: “one more way to punish us,” she says. Puig is sentenced to 12 years in prison for public disorder and contempt. He currently remains in a jail in his hometown.

At the beginning of February, the special envoy of Pope Francis, Cardinal Beniamino Stella, affirmed during his visit to Havana that a potential amnesty for the Cuban prisoners imprisoned after the protests is “on the table”, but admitted that the answer does not depend of the Catholic Church. However, so far, the Cuban government has not made a statement.

A country in crisis

Cuba is going through a crisis compared to that of the so-called Special Period, when it lost its ally and main trading partner with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

The economic and social crisis of recent years worsened with the pandemic and the US sanctions following the protests. With the measures, Washington has sought to pressure the government to respect human rights and release political prisoners.

The Cuban government reported in January 2022 that the Prosecutor’s Office presented more than a hundred judicial files in which 790 people were being prosecuted in relation to the protests.

The transportation deficit, the lack of food and the high cost of living are just some of the challenges faced by ordinary Cubans, which are aggravated for the relatives of the prisoners, who often have to travel long distances, even a end of the country to the other to visit relatives in jails.

The organization Prisoner Defenders, based in Spain, figure in 1,077 prisoners for political reasons in Cuba until January 2023. Meanwhile, justice 11jcreated as a result of the largest protests on the island in more than 60 years, maintains that 768 people remain in prison.

Roberto Pérez Fonseca, 37, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and is serving them in a prison in Quivicán, Mayabeque.

“It is always a pain for a mother to have her son imprisoned, whatever the circumstance, but when you know that he is innocent, you feel powerless… a lot of pain, it is a mixture of many feelings because one does not know how to defend him,” says Roberto’s mother, Liset Fonseca.

With prison transfers, solitary confinement plus the aggravations of a 7-year sentence, Liset admits that she is hopeless about her legal recourse.

“Here legally there is nothing (…) They know that they are not right because [los encarcelados tras el 11J] they are innocent. When State Security summoned me, they told me: ‘we know they did nothing’, and to my question why, if you know, someone doesn’t say ‘this is a lie’, and the answer was that they never did. they are going to do it because the judicial system is not going to say that it is useless”.

As part of the efforts to give visibility to the cause of the 9/11 prisoners, Albert Fonseca, Liset’s son and Robert’s brother, promoted from Canada, where he lives, a group of women relatives of those imprisoned under the organization Cuba de Luto.

The imprisonments after the historic protests have not stopped. Amnesty International warned last October about the pattern of arrests and repression of demonstrators who protested shouting freedom and other slogans due to the lack of electricity. The government proceeded to cut off the Internet connection in various parts of the country, says the international organization.

“The international community must condemn the cycles of repression that we are seeing in Cuba in the strongest possible terms. It is unacceptable that the authorities continue to intimidate, threaten, detain, stigmatize and try to silence anyone who demands basic necessities such as electricity, food and freedom”, it indicates. the notice Amnesty alert.

“It changed our lives in every way”

Relatives consulted exposed their experiences on the multiple prison transfers they face and what this means.

Saily Núñez has two minor children. According to his testimony, they suffer “a strong emotional imbalance due to the absence of his father.” The conversation with the VOA is interrupted for a few minutes by a call from the husband. “They are moving him back to Quivicán right now,” says the woman, who looks puzzled.

“Maikel [Puig] it was everything here, the livelihood of the family, everything”, explains the graduate in Microbiology, who left her job to take care of the house after the arrest and conviction of her husband. “That’s where the nightmare began because it changed our lives in every way.”

Núñez relates that interprovincial trips left her and the children exhausted. “They put us as one more way to punish us, they distanced us a lot, more than 150 kilometers away”, to be on time on the day of the visit to the prison, he relied on the help of Sonia Álvarez, the wife of the political prisoner Félix Navarro and mother of the also imprisoned Sahyli Navarro.

The news of the transfer is not the end, says Núñez when referring to Maikel Puig. “I keep demanding my husband’s freedom over and over again because I want him home, I want him back with the family,” he says.

fill the gap

The Cuban government has rejected criticism from relatives and human rights groups about irregularities in the judicial processes. Government-controlled media maintain that they are “neither political prisoners nor prisoners of conscience” and that they were prosecuted for “common crimes”.

The Havana authorities also maintain that the defendants were able to testify and answer the questions of both the prosecutors and the defense. They assure that the right to abstain and not to do so was respected, and each one told their version of the facts. Cuba has also blamed the United States, with whom it has had a political dispute for more than six decades.

The Joe Biden government has denied the accusations and condemned the imprisonments. High-ranking State Department officials have urged the island’s government to release all political prisoners.

“That space is empty, that space… I long for it to be occupied again,” says Ailex Marcano, while recalling that living with his son has been interrupted.

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