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A State Security agent and an officer from the Revolutionary National Police visited the home of opposition figure and former political prisoner Yandier García Labrada, 42 years old, in Manatí, Las Tunas, last week to warn him that he would be imprisoned again if he did not cease his political activism.
The complaint was publicly made by his brother, the activist Irán Almaguer Labrada, who described the visit as an operation to issue threats regarding my brother Yandier's activism.
“We are activists of the Christian liberation movement, and our work is to proclaim liberation, to proclaim the freedom of our country,” said Almaguer Labrada to Martí Noticias.
According to Almaguer Labrada, the agents told García Labrada that "if he continued doing that, he would go back to prison."
The harassment is a response to the work that García Labrada does as a member of the Movimiento Cristiano Liberación (MCL) in Las Tunas, where he explains to the public the foundations of the organization to achieve a peaceful political change in Cuba.
In the face of the threat, his brother reaffirmed the movement's stance: "We are activists of the Christian Liberation Movement, and our work is to proclaim freedom, to proclaim the liberation of our country."
García Labrada, known as "El Vaquero" for the Texas hat he wears daily, was released on January 16, 2025, after serving four years and three months of a five-year prison sentence.
However, that release was not complete: it was granted under a revocable extrapenal license, as part of the mass releases mediated by the Vatican that the regime announced on January 14, 2025. This condition exposes him to being re-imprisoned if the authorities believe he violates any restrictions, and the threat received this week precisely illustrates that macabre game: the regime releases under threats, maintains the sentences.
A former worker of the Flora and Fauna Company in the Ecological Reserve of Bahía de Nuevas Grandes-La Isleta, García Labrada was arrested on October 6, 2020, while standing in line to buy food in Manatí, where he protested the handling of the merchandise, supported by others present. He was the only one who remained in pre-trial detention.
After spending nine months without being brought to trial, he was sentenced in July 2021 to the maximum penalty of five years in a telematic trial described as "full of irregularities."
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