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The page Razones de Cuba, a propaganda tool of the Counterintelligence and State Security of the regime, published a to justify the detention of Javier Ernesto Martín Gutiérrez, a Cuban mixed martial arts champion known as 'Spiderman', who was arrested last Friday in Havana.
The text, titled "From the Balcony to Villa Marista: What Anti-Cuba Media Hides About the Spiderman Case," unfolded three main arguments: to downplay the protest as "public disorder," to suggest that Martín Gutiérrez suffers from a psychiatric disorder, and to portray his transfer to Villa Marista as an act of medical mercy.
After referring to the athlete as a disturber of neighborhood peace, the program presented by Humberto Dionil López Suárez attempted to defuse the protest and the boxer’s complaints with the typical regime narrative, infused with a convoluted and brazen populism.
"No media interviewed those who could not sleep, the children who heard screams all day. In any country in the world, 9 days of public uproar is a public disorder, not activism," emphasized Razones de Cuba, once again attempting to discredit the protest gesture and the coverage provided by independent press regarding the case of Martín Gutiérrez.
The Cuban MMA champion was violently arrested after more than eight days of protests from his balcony on 31 Avenue, where he denounced the social crisis, the use of "the chemical" and street violence.
Plainclothes agents intercepted him on 90th Street between 41st and 43rd, struck him for resisting, and took him in an unmarked vehicle to Villa Marista, the historical headquarters of the Cuban political police.
During his live broadcasts, Martín Gutiérrez had denounced: "Women rummaging through the garbage and children eating from the dumps, while some have everything. There is no equality, not even in poverty."
However, Razones de Cuba responded to those complaints with the argument of "neighborhood peace and children who couldn't sleep," as if hunger and blackouts were not the real "calvary" for the Cuban people.
This cheap populism serves a clear purpose: to criminalize legitimate protest by using the grievances of the neighbors as a pretext, while hiding the fact that MININT officials confessed to the family that the detained individual was beaten during the arrest.
The second axis of the post is more serious: the pathologization of dissent.
Razones de Cuba stated that "close sources indicate behaviors associated with undiagnosed psychiatric disorders: incessant shouting, incoherent accusations, isolation," and that Martín Gutiérrez was taken to Villa Marista "for an evaluation to determine if he has any disorder and how to assist him."
This tactic has decades of history in Cuba: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was admitted to a militarized psychiatric ward at Calixto García Hospital in 2021, and Archivo Cuba requested that the World Psychiatric Association expel Cuba for psychiatric abuse.
Since the 1960s, the Mazorra hospital housed dissidents falsely diagnosed as mentally ill, subjected to electroshock without anesthesia and forced psychotropic medications, practices documented by Amnesty International since 1977.
The pattern is always the same: someone who protests is not a citizen with legitimate reasons, but rather a sick person who "needs help".
Villa Marista is not, under any circumstances, a clinical center: it has been the headquarters of State Security since 1963, established with training from KGB instructors, where sessions of psychological torture lasting more than eight hours are documented, along with prolonged isolation and the fabrication of confessions for state television.
In November 2025, the director of El Toque denounced the attempt by the Cuban regime to coerce testimonies through those sessions in that same building.
Razones de Cuba is not a journalistic medium either: it is a digital counterintelligence tool led by Humberto López. Meta blocked its Facebook and Instagram accounts in May 2025 for violations of community standards, and in 2022 the platform dismantled a network of nearly a thousand fake Cuban accounts coordinated to amplify official content and attack opponents.
To conclude its disgraceful post, Razones de Cuba ended with an expression of unparalleled cynicism and cruelty: Now that Martín Gutiérrez is imprisoned, "in Marianao, the neighbors sleep without screams and in Villa Marista a man receives a clinical evaluation, not torture."
This is how repression works in Cuba: not only through beatings and cells, but also with this level of institutionalized manipulation of language, where an arbitrary detention at the political police's headquarters is turned into a "clinical evaluation" and a legitimate protest is reduced to "public disorder."
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