14ymedio, Havana, 29 December 2019 — The activist and journalist Iliana Hernández has been confronting the authorities for several years, who subject her to strict control and frequent short detentions. The ex-director of the program Lente Cubano (Cuban Lens) and current correspondent of CiberCuba was arrested this May during a march organised by the LGBTI community.
The march was organised by the independent civil society in the Central Park of Old Havana, and despite not being authorised it developed initially without problems, with some three hundred people marching through the centre of Paseo del Prado in the direction of the esplanade.
With rainbow flags and shouts of “Yes we could!”, the crowd marched until the end of the avenue, where various activists, among them Hernández, were violently intercepted and arrested by police agents and the Security of State.
A month later she was detained again when she was on her way to celebrate her 46th birthday and one week later, again, for organising to demand that Etecsa, a Cuban telecomunications company, lower their prices.
The activist has been one of the people that has dedicated herself the most to these campaigns that in the summer kept the authorities on tenterhooks for the quantity of people that joined them, making the hashtag #BajenLosPreciosDeInternet (Lower the Prices of Internet) a trending topic.
In October she suffered what to date is her last arrest, alongside Boris González, which coincided with the naming of Miguel Díaz-Canel as the president of the Republic.
See also: 14ymedio’s 14 Faces of 2019
Translated by Helen Brown
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