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Agents of the State Security and prison authorities threatened political prisoners with death this Friday: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Daniel Alfaro Frías, and Jorge Ayala in the maximum-security prison of Guanajay, in the province of Artemisa.
Alfaro Frías reported the events through a phone call to Martí Noticias, in which he described how officials from Department 21 and the prison director in the province, Javier Reboso, conducted an inspection in the cells that led to direct confrontations with the inmates.
According to Alfaro's testimony, the agents provoked Otero Alcántara during the search, and the artist questioned the regime's military capability by asking if they believed they could repel a foreign attack with just four AKM rifles.
The response from the officials was a direct threat: "With one of those same AKMs that you mentioned, we come here, but we are going to kill you here."
"They were provoking Alcántara... they entered into a debate and threatened him that they were coming to kill him with an AKM," he stated.
Alfaro Frías, aged 62, also reported being personally threatened in light of a possible scenario of foreign intervention on the island: "I was threatened that if the Americans come here to Cuba, the first thing they're going to do is kill us."
The activist, coordinator of the movement Opositores por una Nueva República, is serving a nine-year sentence for crimes of unlawful association and demonstrations after being arrested in San Antonio de los Baños in 2024.
Threats occurred just four days after the Provincial Popular Court of Artemisa rejected, last Monday, the habeas corpus petition filed by the organization Cubalex to achieve the immediate release of Otero Alcántara, who, according to the defense, would have already served his five-year sentence by adding the time spent in provisional detention and reductions for good behavior.
Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement, has been imprisoned since July 11, 2021, when he was arrested while attempting to join the anti-government protests that shook all of Cuba on that day.
His health condition is critical: he suffers from chikungunya, skin herpes, intestinal parasites, and infections without receiving adequate medical attention, and in December 2025 he began a new hunger strike in protest of his confinement conditions.
The Department 21 of State Security is the counterintelligence section of the Ministry of the Interior, specialized in monitoring and repressing dissidents, and its presence at this Friday's inspection underscores the political nature of the threats.
Alfaro Frías concluded his report with a warning about the general situation in the prison: "Political prisoners today are in danger for our lives here in the prison, at least here in the prison of Guanajay".
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