An Interior Ministry (MININT) officer who sexually abused a four-year-old girl in the municipality of Buey Arriba was sentenced, in a second instance, to three years of imprisonment by the Granma Provincial Court, as reported by the independent media outlet Diario de Cuba (DDC).
Maikel Solano Arévalo was sentenced by this judicial body, three months after the Municipal Court of Buey Arriba initially sentenced him to only three years of correctional work without imprisonment, which meant he would not set foot in prison, according to DDC.
Despite receiving such a sentence, the minor's family considers the penalty to be light. "I appealed hoping for better results, but it was the opposite. I am not satisfied nor am I pleased, because I can no longer do anything. I cannot continue appealing. But I still find that sentence very light," said Yelenis Pinilla Espinosa, the girl's grandmother, to DDC.
This grandmother, fixing her gaze on the Cuban Penal Code, hoped for the maximum sentence for Solano Arévalo.
In article 396, subsection 3, of the Cuban Penal Code, it is stipulated that the sanction for sexual abuse carries a penalty of two to five years.
For the former Cuban judge Maylin Fernández Suris, expert in family and gender-based violence issues and lawyer for DDC, "justice has come late and only thanks to the family's disagreement and appeal. The family shouldn't have had to go through an appeals trial, with all the costs involved, because it means having to pay a lawyer."
The minor's grandmother, after denouncing the first sentence of the Buey Arriba Court, said that the defendant had access to the minor because he is married to the woman who was taking care of her.
He lives just three blocks away from the girl, who is now five years old, who, by not protesting the measure, would have had to keep seeing him in the neighborhood.
Solano is identified by Pinilla as an agent of the State Security.
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