The Cuban activist Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known as "Anna Bensi," published a video on Facebook that has accumulated over 152,000 views in which she emphatically denounces the repression of the Cuban regime against political prisoners on the island.
The 21-year-old resident of Alamar, Havana, asserts that "the Cuban dictatorship does not govern, it kidnaps a country" and that she fears "something more dangerous than any weapon: the truth."
"More than a thousand Cubans locked up. Not for killing. Not for stealing, not for being terrorists, but for speaking, for thinking, for saying this is wrong," Anna Bensi points out in the recording, which also has 16,949 likes and 1,200 comments.
The activist dismantles the official discourse of the regime with a straightforward statement: "The dictatorship does not imprison criminals; it imprisons examples. They need to instill terror so that no one else speaks out."
The video is produced in the midst of a systematic harassment that the Cuban State Security has been maintaining against her and her mother, Caridad «Cary» Silvente, since March of this year.
On March 10, both recorded and disseminated an irregular citation delivered by MININT agents. Two days later, State Security interrogated the mother for two hours.
On March 25, a mother and daughter were charged as co-authors under Article 393 of the Cuban Penal Code —related to "acts against personal and family privacy, one's own image and voice"— facing sentences ranging from two to five years in prison, remaining under house arrest and prohibited from leaving the country.
Between April 13 and 14, counterintelligence agents attempted to recruit Anna as an informant during an interrogation at the Alamar police station, even offering her support for her music career in exchange for silencing her activism.
The regime has also resorted to digital repression: on April 21, Anna Bensi reported the coordinated hacking of her WhatsApp accounts and the simultaneous deactivation of her ETECSA lines, preventing her from recovering access through verification codes.
Despite everything, on May 6 she published a new video criticizing the defenders of the regime, titled "Reflections of the Diary | Part 3: Talentless Clowns," in which she stated: "Communism works in two places: in books and in the bank accounts of those who run it."
The case of Anna Bensi has gained international attention. On April 9, Mike Hammer, head of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Cuba, visited Anna and her mother at their home in Alamar and stated, "What you say impacts and moves a lot of people."
The context in which the video is published is alarming: according to Prisoners Defenders, Cuba reached an all-time high of 1,260 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in April 2026, including 35 minors and 142 women.
Anna Bensi closed her video with a phrase that summarizes the essence of her statement: "No system that needs to imprison the innocent to survive deserves to survive."
Filed under: