Artist Abel Lescay sentenced to five years of limited freedom

The young musician and 9/11 protesterAbel Lescay He was sentenced to five years of limited freedom, and will only be able to leave his home for work and study reasons.

“My sentence has already come out. 5 years of limitation of freedom. It is at home, working or studying. I congratulate myself. Thank you all very much for your great help,” indicated the former student of the Higher Institute of Art (ISA), of thewho was discharged “due to poor academic performance” when I was in the second year of a degree in music.

The young man, who after his expulsion said that he would get to work to release a new album, stated that he intends to make “music for all the voices that weave the present.A new free music album in Cuba”.

“They dismissed me from the ISA. I failed some subjects, they couldn't give me a repetition. I don't lose much more than a shelter. “I continue my preparation as a composer with my beloved teacher Juan Piñera,” the young man expressed on his social networks.

Lescay was sentenced to six years in prison for offending a police officer on June 11. After hearing the sentence that the courts imposed on him for exercising his right to demonstrate, the musician described the verdict as “a shame”

"They hit me with 6 sticks. Tomorrow I will give the official news. What nerve, asere, See you on Friday in Casamarilla, I'm going to put on a tremendous concert," Lescay wrote on Facebook at the end of March, shortly after hearing the news.

Dissatisfied with the sentence, the young man appealed to the Court of San José de Las Lajas at the beginning of June and was awaiting the verdict after the appeal trial. "The trial was the same as always. You have to wait for the result. "Thank you!" he described pessimistically.

The musician, who from the beginning admitted that he went too far duringthe historic protests of 11J When calling a police officer a “faggot,” he said in his turn to speak in the appeal that he had already been punished for that, since he was detained for seven days.

This Wednesday, the appeal filed by the young man against his sentence was finally successful,modifying the prison sentence from six years to five years of limitation of freedom, also known as “house arrest.”

Isel María Lescay Oliva, his mother, revealed that the appeal hearing lasted hours and that her son intervened to say that he was not a criminal or had bad social behavior, and that the only thing he knew how to do in his life was study piano.

"He acknowledged that he had gone too far, that he had acted badly, that it was not right to offend people with words on the street, much less a police officer. But that what he had done was a rap, which is part of the things that He studies and that raps are like that. That they require a certain marginality and that he understood that he had gone too far and that he had already been punished for that, that he had already been detained for seven days, that he had suffered all the harshness that that implied," he explained. the woman.

Lescay's case aroused the solidarity of many of his fellow students,the Movement for the Freedom of Abel Lescay was created. Members of this group reported threats from the authorities of the University of the Arts, who sought to prevent them from promoting civic actions in favor of the Cuban musician.

A statement from the Movement stated in April that it had received expressions of solidarity from foreign university students and "people from inside and outside the island, academics, professionals, public figures, journalists, activists, workers and workers in the private sector."