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The Municipal Court of Palma Soriano, in Santiago de Cuba, has concluded the trial against three activists from Palmarito de Cauto who participated in a protest involving pot-banging against power outages in November 2024, with prosecutors requesting sentences of up to 10 years in prison.
According to information from Martí Noticias, the accused are Mileidis Maceo Quiñones, Edilkis León Giraudis, and Oneida Quiñones, members of the Unión Patriótica de Cuba (UNPACU), who have been detained for over 18 months since their arrests.
The oral hearing took place last Friday, June 5, but the verdict will not be known before July 1, according to the court itself, which prolongs the uncertainty for the accused and their families.
The Prosecutor's Office requested 10 years of imprisonment for Mileidis Maceo Quiñones for the alleged crime of assault; eight years for Edilkis León Giraudis and five years for Oneida Quiñones, both for alleged public disorder and damage.
In May, when the initial prosecution request was revealed, the reported sentence for Maceo was 13 years; the reduction to 10 years during the oral trial may be due to a modification of charges between the preliminary accusation and the final process.
Maceo and León have been held in the women's prison in the province of Santiago de Cuba since December 4, 2024, when they were transferred from the cells of the Mella Police Unit after 19 days of detention.
Oneida Quiñones, who has a physical disability —she is missing a hand— in addition to diabetes, hypertension, and chronic asthma, is under house arrest as a precautionary measure.
The three were arrested after the protest on November 15, 2024, when hundreds of residents of Palmarito de Cauto took to the streets banging pots to demand the restoration of electricity service.
Mileidis Maceo and Edilkis León, former members of the Ladies in White, remain connected to UNPACU, one of the most repressed opposition organizations in the country.
The opposition figure Maidolis Oribe, a fellow local of the prisoners and an activist with a documented history of over 100 arrests, warned that the regime will not reduce the sentences.
"In the way that I have fought all these years, and I know how the State Security operates, they will not reduce their sentences. As for Oneida, because she is a sick person, they do not believe in that; they may consider her as a person with disabilities, who is missing a hand, who has diabetes, who is hypertensive, who is a chronic asthmatic, but regarding Mileidis and Edilkis, they will not take anything away from them because of the stance they have always maintained as activists," Oribe stated.
Regarding the electrical crisis that prompted the protest, Oribe was emphatic: "They are not going to fix the situation, which is becoming more dire; they only provide an hour of electricity, and this is criminal. You have to be here to see that this really is a Nazi concentration camp. People who were always active, those who had a healthy body weight, now look like homeless individuals and don’t even weigh 100 pounds."
The case reflects a systematic pattern of criminalizing protest: in Encrucijada (Villa Clara), six citizens who protested against power outages on November 7, 2024, received sentences of up to eight years; in Bayamo, 15 protesters from the March 2024 protests received sentences ranging from three to nine years in September 2025.
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