The Cuban activist Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known on social media as Anna Bensi, spent almost 12 hours detained at the Alamar police station on Wednesday and recounted in a video posted on Facebook the threats she received: an instructor warned her that her videos contained incitements to public disorder and that if that "were to materialize," she would be imprisoned.
Bensi entered the station at 10 in the morning and was not released until 9 at night, suffering from a headache and having not eaten properly throughout the day. The 21-year-old young woman suffers from anemia and arrived home in the dark.
According to her own account, the first four hours passed without anyone attending to her while she sat in the main hall of the station.
She was then subjected to an interrogation by a man and a woman, the duration of which she could not specify. "The interrogation boils down to the same old spiel, asking about the blockade, the sanctions against Cuba, and well, they told me to change my videos, to make different kinds of content," she described.
Around 8 p.m., she was taken to "carpeta" and forced to sign a document called "preventive work," a formal warning based on Article 268 of the Penal Code, which penalizes incitement to public disorder.
When he requested a copy of the document he had just signed, it was denied. "They told me no, that it wasn't necessary," he reported.
In her statement to the agents, Bensi documented her position: "I, Ana Sofía Benítez Silvente, have never incited anything in any of my videos, nor will I." In front of the cameras, she was more direct: "I simply express myself, and to those who identify with it, congratulations."
Upon leaving the station, a video captured the moment she was crying. She herself took the opportunity to clarify: "I want to make it clear that this is a cry of helplessness." She closed her message with a conclusion that summarized the day: "Every day I become more convinced that I live under a dictatorship. Freedom for Cuba."
The detention of Bensi was not an isolated incident. That same Wednesday, other content creators critical of the regime were also summoned and detained at various police units in Havana: the evangelical pastor Rolando Pérez Lora, known as "Pregonero de Cristo," was taken to the Alamar station, while siblings Amanda Beatriz and Abel Alejandro Andrés Navarro, from the collective "Fuera de la Caja Cuba," were held at the unit on Aguilera Street, in the 10 de Octubre municipality.
The U.S. Embassy in Havana publicly condemned the repression on that same day, in the context of the #Freedom250 campaign for American Independence Day.
The pressure against Bensi has been building for months. Since March 25, 2026, she and her mother have been under house arrest accused of "acts against personal and family privacy" for recording and disseminating a video in which a Ministry of Interior sub-officer delivered an irregular summons to them.
Both face penalties of two to five years in prison and are prohibited from leaving the country. The organization Cubalex has advocated that filming the police is a constitutional right.
This Friday, when uploading the video he had recorded the night before without an internet connection, Bensi wrote: "Once again, thank you for highlighting the injustices that happened yesterday with Pregonero, Fuera de la Caja, and me. Freedom." At the time of this report, Pastor Rolando Pérez Lora was still being detained.
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