Artemisa prosecutor added to the list of repressors after sentencing political opponents

The prosecutor Niurka Margarita Tabares Valdés, from the province of Artemisa, was included in the list of Cuban Repressors, an initiative that documents and denounces officials involved in acts of political repression.

In a message sent to CiberCuba, it is explained that Tabares Valdés was added to file number 1904 of the project represorescubanos.com, due to her actions during the hearing held on August 5 in the Municipal Court of Guanajay, where she requested joint sentences of 10, 8, and 5 years in prison against the opponents Daniel Alfaro Frías, José Antonio Pompa López, and Lázaro Mendoza García, members of the organization Cuba Primero. 

The charges brought were "Propaganda against the constitutional order" and "Illicit associations, gatherings, and demonstrations."

Trial marked by political motivations

According to the project, Tabares Valdés engaged in malfeasance, following directives from the political police to impose lengthy and unjust sentences. The accused were alleged to have received funding and direction from abroad for distributing anti-government leaflets, a narrative that —they claim— seeks to obscure the existence of internal dissent against a regime overwhelmed by the worst socioeconomic crisis in the country's recent history.

The Penal Code in effect since December 2022 classifies "Propaganda against the constitutional order" as a crime, punishable by three to ten years in prison for anyone who "incites against social order, international solidarity, or the socialist state" through oral or written means. Human rights organizations report that this provision has become a tool of repression used to punish even opinions expressed on social media.

A record to document repression

The Cuban Repressors project collects and publishes information about officials who, according to its advocates, attack the integrity of individuals by using the judicial or administrative apparatus for political purposes.

Its stated goal is to "shame and expose" those who hand down sentences that destroy lives, while reminding them that "the option to say NO always exists."

In June, the prosecutor of Matanzas, Ana Lilian Caballero Arango, and the PNR officer, María Juantorena Herrera, were also included in the list for their involvement in the case of the academics Alina Bárbara López Hernández and Jenny Pantoja Torres.

Caballero Arango was included for unjustly requesting four and three years of imprisonment respectively, replaced by correctional labor without confinement, for dissenting academics, reported the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba (FHRC, for its acronym in English).

Juantorena, for his part, brutally assaulted "the dissenting intellectuals after intercepting on May 18, 2024, at the Bacunayagua checkpoint the rental car in which the two historians were traveling from Matanzas to Havana."