Blind people in Las Tunas report police abuse against them

Of the blind people of Las Tunas they denounced the police abuse of “law enforcement” agents against them for marketing products.

The Cuban Divany Peña denounced on his social networks that he and Aliuska Oliva Heredia were arrested this Monday and taken to a police unit for selling "illicit products" that, in Peña's words "surely do not affect the country's economy, because they are not stolen, nor are they bought here."

The merchandise they sold in the center of the city of Las Tunas - Kola Loca glue, razor blades and batteries, among others - was seized from Peña and Oliva, without taking into account that they are "disabled people who have families and live off the few profits that these products provide," wrote the man from Las Tuscany.

"I denounce all the abuses that are committed daily by the police and the inspection body of this province," stressed the citizen who claimed to receive a minimum pension of 1,500 pesos on which one cannot survive in Cuba.

In addition to the confiscation of the merchandise, the two Cubans will have to pay a fine for the illegal sale with their meager monthly payment.

According to what was revealed in its publication, a couple of police officers led by the public order agent "Simón" arrived at the place without showing up and demanded the sellers' identification card and then called a patrol car.

At the police station, Peña continued, they were there from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, when they were finally attended to. They did not receive any attention, food or water.

The police arbitrariness against them is, in the words of the man from Las Las Tunas, a cruel act. Because of their disability they cannot work in other jobs and the marketing of these products is the way to earn a living.

"I think that by acting in this way the Cuban government has divorced itself from the obligations it has towards people with these conditions," said Peña.

Cubans with physical disabilities receive a tiny pension with which the government intends for them to survive in a country with one of the highest inflations in the world and immersed in a serious food shortage crisis.

Recently the case of a young woman from Camagüey with physical limitations caused by an accident, who only receives a pension of 812 pesos per month, almost a third of the minimum wage.

Although the Minister of Labor and Social Security in Cuba, Marta Elena Feitó Cabrera, recognized that salaries and pensions on the island were not enough, the authorities persecute and suffocate those individuals who require extra income to survive.