The Cuban mixed martial arts champion Javier Ernesto Martín Gutiérrez, known as "Spiderman," was detained this Friday in Havana by a group of agents in civilian clothes who assaulted him before taking him away in a black vehicle.
The journalist José Raúl Gallego was the first to report the complaint after speaking with a relative of the athlete. "He was arrested at 90 between 41 and 43, Marianao, near the Jesús Menéndez sports complex. Just two hours earlier, the young man had shared a video of himself training."
"The arrest was carried out by a group of plainclothes officers in a black vehicle, who gave him a brutal beating and took him away," Gallego wrote.
"The family has no information about his current condition or where he was taken," the journalist added.
Spiderman, champion of the Cuban Fighting League in the 135-pound category, had been peacefully protesting from his balcony for about a week at his home on Avenue 31 in Havana, opposite the El Lido terminal.
In his videos, the athlete denounced the humanitarian crisis that Cuba is experiencing: "There are women digging through the garbage and children eating from the trash while some people have everything. There is no equality even in poverty."
In the days leading up to his arrest, Spiderman had warned that State Security agents showed up at his mother's workplace to pressure her, and he displayed images of agents stationed outside his home.
Last Wednesday, on the sixth day of his protest, he declared: "The communist system is dead. You saw the state security, it’s you. Look at your own faces. No one is coming."
The arrest directly contradicts the statements made by Miguel Díaz-Canel in an interview with NBC News aired on April 12, where he denied the existence of political prisoners in Cuba and stated that no one is detained for expressing themselves.
The activist Anamely Ramos from the San Isidro Movement had publicly warned before the arrest: "Are you going to go hunt this young man with your hordes of hired thugs? Know that if you do, the scandalous lie of the one who claims to be president will be even more exposed."
This Friday, just hours before the news of his detention broke, Yonexi Gutiérrez, sister of Spiderman and a former political prisoner living outside of Cuba, released a video denouncing her brother's isolation. "He has been alone for a week. He does have support from those outside, but inside Cuba, he has no one," she said.
Yonexi also warned: "Javier cannot be afraid of going to prison. Do you know why? Because Javier knows what it is, because the one here was imprisoned."
The arrest pattern is consistent with the documented methods used by human rights organizations for the detention of opponents in Cuba. Justicia 11J reported that there are currently 775 political prisoners in Cuba, 338 of whom were unfairly sentenced for participating in the historic protests of July 11, 2021.
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