Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel affirmed that in Cuba no one is repressed for expressing an opinion against the revolution, despite the more than a thousand political prisoners on the island and the recent sentences announced against peaceful protesters.
In an interview with the pro-regime intellectual Ignacio Ramonet where he asked "if the Cuban Constitution guarantees the right to demonstrate," Díaz-Canel responded that the state "does not have a repressive response" to these types of events, the official newspaper quoted him as saying. Granma.
According to the president, dissent in Cuba "does not have a repressive response" but it can "have a popular response" from the population who, in Díaz-Canel's opinion, prefer to "talk with the Government and talk with the Party" about their claims.
He says that these people are the ones who "have confronted and have not allowed" the dissidents to "speak counterrevolutionary slogans or other types of things"; but "even that opinion that someone who is not with the Revolution may have is not repressed," he emphasized.
"What happens is that many times, because it is part of the same platform of subversion, those who protest in this way against the Revolution, who are the least, in these protests commit vandalism and attack state property, social property, they alter public order, and that then does require a response that is not due to ideology, it is a judicial response, a legal response as they would do in any other country, because they are altering public order, they are disturbing citizen tranquility, they are committing misdeeds or committing acts of vandalism," he argued.
The interview given to the Spanish professor and journalist at the Palace of the Revolution on May 11 will be broadcast tonight on national television, but Granma's advance has caused outrage among the newspaper's readers, who affirm that the president's statements are " a gross lie."
"Here we have one more example of the hypocrisy of the communist regime, where has communism been successful? Everything is a crude lie, media manipulation, lacking transparency in the information they give, they think that the world believes all their lies, for Please stop raving with your dung minds," said a Cuban in the comments to Granma's Facebook post.
Cuba has repressed by force and through the creation of new crimes and arbitrary trials of peaceful protesters, opponents and activists. Also through the expulsion from universities and workplaces of dozens of students and employees who have expressed criticism of the regime.
On May 12, a group of mothers of Cuban political prisoners published an open letter in which they asked for the release of their children and warned the regime authorities that they will continue to denounce the injustice against their relatives.
Last March at least six people were arrested for demonstrating in the Holguín town of San Andrés on March 8, and in recent days the sentences of up to 15 years of deprivation of liberty against young people who in 2022 protested in Nuevitas due to the endless blackouts that affected that city of Camagüey.
Two weeks ago, independent journalist José Luis Tan Estrada was detained and threatened for four days at the State Security headquarters in Havana, Villa Marista.
More than 700 Cubans, most of them young people, were tried and sentenced for the protests of July 11, 2021. There are more than 1,000 political prisoners on the island, according to the NGO Prisoners Defenders.
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