The Cuban activist and content creator Anna Bensi revealed in an interview with filmmaker Ian Padrón the details of the interrogation she underwent on April 13 by agents of the Cuban regime's counterintelligence, who openly warned her: "It would be a shame for you to spend your youth in a penitentiary prison."
The testimony, published on Padrón's official Facebook page under the label DCR, describes a dual strategy employed by the agents: psychological mistreatment towards her mother and sister, and an apparently friendly tone with her that, as she reported, concealed direct threats.
"With my mom and my sister, they were treated very poorly, really very poorly, and with me they came with a friendly approach, as if to do a brainwashing," Anna, 21, stated. "But beneath that friendly discourse, there were threats lurking just beneath the surface."
Anna responded to the agents that she was not committing any crime. "I was simply expressing myself respectfully, as I always do, respecting my own thoughts. I did not agree with this here, and they have to respect that," she stated.
The agents, according to her account, insisted that she was in that interrogation "because of decisions she had made" and that "you were just a little bit away from being arrested."
The questioning on April 13 was, as it turned out, a coordinated trap: Anna and her mother, Caridad Silvente, were summoned under the pretext of signing documents, while other nearby activists were simultaneously called to another police unit to leave them alone and cut off from communication.
Three counterintelligence agents —two women and a man who never identified themselves— interrogated her using the "good cop, bad cop" tactic and even offered to advance her musical career in exchange for her to abandon her activism: "That dream can be realized, Sofía. That dream is in your hands, it only depends on you. We can help you with that."
Anna rejected the proposal without hesitation: "I will never work for a dictatorship."
In March, Anna Bensi and her mother released a video in which a MININT officer handed them an irregular summons. Authorities used that video to accuse them under Article 393 of the Cuban Penal Code, which carries sentences of between two and five years in prison for "acts against personal and family intimacy, as well as one's own image and voice." Since March 25, both have been placed under house arrest, prohibited from leaving the country or traveling between provinces.
The repression extended to the entire family: Anna's sister, Elmis Rivero Silvente, a U.S. citizen, was interrogated and threatened by State Security on April 10, just hours before boarding her flight to Miami.
The case has garnered international attention. The U.S. diplomat Mike Hammer, head of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, visited Anna on April 9 and stated that "her only crime has been defending her beliefs, her faith." In May, both Hammer and Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly expressed their support for the young activist.
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