Recording cannot be a crime; the double standard of Cuban justice: Anna Bensi and Alina Bárbara López

We are witnessing today, October 1, 2026, the conclusion of a repeated script before the Municipal Court of Havana del Este: the criminal trial against the young content creator Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known as Anna Bensi, and her mother, Caridad Silvente.

His alleged crime, according to the legal framework of the regime: "acts against personal and family privacy."

All for having turned on a mobile phone at the entrance of his home in Alamar and capturing the image of a plainclothes sergeant, dressed casually in flip-flops, who came to deliver a summons without the required formalities.

For the citizenry, recording is a shield of transparency; for those in power, it is a punishable affront.

The story takes on a sinister symmetry when contrasted with the experience of the historian and academic Alina Bárbara López Hernández at the PNR checkpoint on the Matanzas-La Habana road in April 2024.

There, the roles were perversely reversed. It was not the citizen who documented the abuse, but the very law enforcement agents who, after beating, subduing, and confining the professor in a patrol transformed into an oven, pulled out a cell phone, filmed her despair, the legitimate insult of a violated citizen, and posted the footage on the fake profile Atenea Matancera to orchestrate a moral lynching, labeling her with derogatory adjectives to undermine her intellectual stature.

According to a statement by Professor Alina Bárbara to CiberCuba, "the officer in the patrol car recorded me while I was locked up, suffocating, and they recorded me without my consent, and not only that, but they uploaded it to a State Security page, Atenea Matancera, where I was the subject of criticism and ridicule, where I was labeled as 'the fine lowlife that pretends to be something else'."

"I reported under the same article that Anna Bensi and her mother are being judged for today, at the Military Prosecutor's Office in Matanzas. The response was to make the video disappear, which exists because my daughter saved it," emphasized the academic.

"You're aware of the double standard that exists, right?" he stated.

Two recordings, two "justices"

The contrast between both episodes exposes the absolute legal asymmetry that prevails in Cuban courts, highlighting how the same technological tool serves to exonerate the State and bury the citizen.

The fundamental difference lies in the nature of the documented act. While Anna Bensi's defense firmly argues that recording a public action by a state agent is a basic right of transparency against arbitrariness, the prosecution assumes that the privacy of the oppressor takes precedence over the safety of the repressed.

In Alina Bárbara's mirror, however, the victim's privacy was trampled by the State itself with the deliberate intent to destroy her reputation.

By filming Alina Bárbara López Hernández without her consent inside an official vehicle and disseminating the material on propaganda platforms, the agents of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) committed serious violations of both Cuban legislation and international agreements

1- Violation of the right to one's own image and privacy

According to the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba itself (Article 48), the right to honor, personal and family privacy, and one's own image is guaranteed.

The police violated this constitutional precept by commercializing and disclosing the vulnerability of an arrested citizen.

2- Abuse of power and misuse of functions 

The officials used state resources and the privileges of their position not to maintain order, but to produce propaganda material aimed at the psychological warfare against a civilian in custody.

3- Violation of due process and protective custody

Anyone who is under arrest is under the responsibility and care of the State.

 Using that state of confinement to publicly expose the detainee constitutes cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

The law of the repressor: "Your phone is a crime; mine, impunity."

We are witnessing an era where criminal law in Cuba has been transformed into a double-edged prism, narrow and punitive for the citizen who tries to document their reality, and broad and protective for the official who abuses their prerogatives.

The criminal process that today brings Anna Bensi and her mother together in East Havana, in memory of the outrage against Professor Alina Bárbara López Hernández two years ago, certifies that in Cuba, the truth is uncomfortable and is punished as a crime, while state infamy is enshrined as law.

Free journalism must affirm in its reports this undeniable truth: when justice becomes selective, courts cease to be temples of the law and turn into mere notaries of political punishment, forcing free journalism to document these paradoxes so that official infamy does not become enshrined as law.