New Penal Code comes into force

The Law 151/2022, Cuban Penal Code, came into force this Thursday and with it the entire legal mechanism to continue the repression against citizens.

The document It was approved in May, during a session of the National Assembly of People's Power, and included 37 new crimes, such as public disorder.

"The government wants nothing that escapes its supervision. They have left nothing unregulated and criminalized," warned the independent organization Cubalex, one of the civil society platforms that has repeatedly denounced the new law.

The organization, based in the United States, recalled that the Code It constitutes a concern for all citizens, for different reasons:

• Classifies criminal, ambiguous, broad and discretionary conduct
• There are around 32 crimes that threaten freedom of expression
• The use of cyberspace as an aggravating factor in criminal liability
• The crime of doing independent journalism
• The death penalty is maintained
• The use of therapeutic safety measures
• Criminal responsibility is from the age of 16
• Non-recognition of feminicide
• They criminalize the dissemination of satellite, television, radio or similar signals
• They allow electronic surveillance
• Monopoly of criminal action in electoral conduct

For his part, the Cuban jurist Fernando Almeyda shared on his Facebook profile an analysis of the Code, in which he highlighted how what the government has done is legalize all the arbitrariness that it had committed until now.

"Why does a State that is not governed by laws but by violence need laws? first as an international shield and second as a declaration," he wrote.

Although the new law eliminated some concepts such as pre-criminal dangerousness and included certain protections on issues such as domestic and gender violence, Almeyda describes this as "make-up to look good with some sector."

"The Ministry of the Interior, the Prosecutor's Office and the Courts have never needed rules to enable them to do what they do. When they want to put someone in prison for political reasons, they either fabricated a crime, or imposed one of the figures that most like it, no matter how absurd it was. Now it is more comfortable and more obvious, because they have criminal charges for which they can prosecute without having to be very creative, but don't be fooled, they don't need them to prosecute, but they do need them to threaten", he emphasized.

In the months prior to the entry into force of Law 151/2022, the Cuban authorities warned of sanctioning people who carry out activism or any action that is considered contrary to the communist regime.

The deputy attorney general, Marcos Caraballo de la Rosa, threatened those who recorded the videos of him.The peaceful protests of recent months, considering it "an element of evidence" to initiate criminal proceedings against the protesters.

"Any means that allows us to prove the occurrence of the crime and the circumstances in which these events occurred and the responsibility or not of people, is legitimate to prove in criminal law," the official warned.