On the fifth anniversary of the protests on July 11, 2021, the activist and father of a political prisoner, Wilber Aguilar Bravo, reported that a patrol from the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) was stationed outside his home.
Photographs posted on his Facebook profile show unit 226-B parked on the street, with the pavement in disrepair and electrical cables crossing above the vehicle, in what Aguilar Bravo himself described as his way of experiencing this anniversary.
Aguilar Bravo is the father of Walnier Luis Aguilar Rivera, a young man sentenced to 12 years in prison for participating in the protests on July 11 in the La Güinera neighborhood, in Arroyo Naranjo, Havana, when he was 21 years old.
"Such is my July 11, possibly also the 12th. Today more than ever, freedom for my son Walnier, freedom for all political prisoners," she wrote in her post, where she also issued a warning: "Silence and fear will no longer speak louder than truth and justice."
The harassment on this Saturday is not an isolated incident. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights has documented at least six repressive acts against Aguilar Bravo just in 2026, including summons for interrogation in March and June, and episodes in which agentsprevented him from leaving his home to search for food intended for his son in prison.
On July 3, 2026, the United States Embassy in Havana explicitly mentioned him as one of those affected by the State Security operation deployed to prevent the participation of activists and journalists around the anniversary.
The case of his son became one of the most emblematic of the 11J. Walnier was detained on July 20, 2021, and initially sentenced to 23 years in prison for sedition, a sentence reduced to 12 years after an appeal process. His defense argued that the court ignored a borderline intellectual disability of organic cause that the young man has had certified since 2014.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures to the family in 2025 in response to the documented pattern of reprisals and requested that Cuba protect the life and integrity of the young man, who expressed suicidal intentions during his imprisonment.
Since January 2026, Walnier has been serving his sentence in the "Nieves Morejón" prison in Guayos, Sancti Spíritus, more than 300 kilometers away from his family, after being moved three times to prisons that are increasingly distant.
The fifth anniversary of the 11J arrives with unprecedented repression figures. According to Prisoners Defenders, Cuba records 1,306 political prisoners as of the end of June 2026, including 40 minors, the highest number ever documented. An amnesty in April 2026 released 2,010 inmates, but explicitly excluded those convicted of "crimes against authority," the category under which the 11J demonstrators were prosecuted.
This Saturday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for the release of Cuban political prisoners on the fifth anniversary of the protests, warning that the United States will use "all available tools."
Aguilar Bravo concluded his publication with a phrase that summarizes five years of struggle: "Accomplices cause more harm than tyrants."
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