Special forces of the Cuban regime burst into the home of Yoel Alejandro Pérez Serrano early on Saturday morning, a young activist who was leading a community aid project in Guamuta, a rural community in the town of El Cobre, Santiago de Cuba.
The operation, reported in a live broadcast published by José Daniel Ferrer García, included a truck of special troops armed with long weapons, the sealing off of the neighborhood, and the detention of the activist.
According to Ferrer García, founder of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) from exile in Miami, the assault occurred around six in the morning.
"The so-called black berets, armed even with long weapons, closed off the neighborhood, not allowing anyone to enter or leave. They turned the house upside down, took the phones, confiscated the food they found, took the pots, jewelry, and took everything they encountered along the way," he reported.
The special forces also cut off the phone signal in the area during the operation. "There was no phone signal, they took down the connectivity, no one had connectivity, they wouldn’t let anyone into the town. People wanted to get in, and the special forces with long guns told them they couldn’t pass," Ferrer reported, citing sources in the region.
A source cited by the opposition added that the agents told the neighbors that "the passage of worms was prohibited," referring to those who supported Pérez Serrano's work.
The independent journalist José Raúl Gallego from his profile on Facebook, revealing that Pérez Serrano had contacted him just a week earlier. "Yoel wrote to me and sent me some videos, asking me to publish them if anything happened to him."
They were videos showing him organizing people in his community to build a clinic and a dining hall using their own resources; in others, he was seen distributing food and praying. For these actions, he had already received threats from State Security on several occasions," Gallego wrote.
He summarized the regime's logic accurately: "The Cuban regime does not allow anyone to do for themselves what they are incapable of doing, because they need to keep people in misery, so that when one day they remember, they can sell two pounds of rice a bit cheaper, and people will have to be grateful to them."
Pérez Serrano was promoting the "Save Cuba" project in Guamuta, which ensured at least one meal a day from Monday to Friday for the elderly, children, the ill, and families in need, and was making progress in the construction of an independent medical clinic with volunteer neighbors.
Ferrer estimated that the activist was assisting around 400 or more people in his area. The day before the assault, Ferrer had reported that mothers in Guamuta were threatened with fines for not sending their children to school due to the lack of food.
Pérez Serrano's public profile grew in November 2025, when he directly confronted Miguel Díaz-Canel during an official visit to El Cobre after Hurricane Melissa, demanding that 90% of the residents of Guamuta had lost their belongings and that they had been left alone.
In July 2026, he staged a protest in El Cobre barefoot and in his underwear, covered with a white sheet bearing the words "Freedom, Democracy, Justice, and Dignity." His community work earned him the nickname "the mayor of Guamuta."
The assault occurs within a context of increasing repression. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights recorded 387 repressive actions in October 2026, including 145 surveillance operations or barricades in front of activists' homes.
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