Ariel Manuel Martín Barroso was prosecuted for “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “contempt” for writing phrases like “Fatherland and Life” and “Díaz-Canel singao [motherfucker]” with a “permanent” marker.
A professor from Sancti Spíritus, Ariel Manuel Martín Barroso, is serving a 10-year sentence in the Nieves Morejón prison, in the municipality of Cabaiguán, Sancti Spíritus, for posting several anti-government graffiti between the last months of 2024 and the first months of 2025.
Arrested on February 25 of that year, Martín Barroso was prosecuted for the crimes of propaganda against the constitutional order and contempt of court in a trial held in Santa Clara last September. The case was made public this Sunday by activists on social media and was confirmed this Tuesday by the Observatory of Academic Freedom.
The NGO denounces that the sentence being served by the professor, 42 years old and a teacher at the Faculty of Technical and Business Sciences of the University of Sancti Spíritus, is “for strictly political reasons.”
The case of Martín Barroso has not been made public until now due to the reluctance of his relatives to report it, sources close to the family told 14ymedio. “His father belongs to the Communist Party, and the family initially thought that speaking publicly would only make things worse,” one of them stated.
The case of Martín Barroso has not been made public until now because of the reluctance of his relatives to report it
According to the sentence, which this newspaper had access to, Martín Barroso posted graffiti such as “down with Díaz-Canel,” “Fatherland and Life,” “Díaz-Canel singao” and “fire with the communists”, with a “permanent black marker -pen- Erich Krause brand,” which was confiscated as evidence of the crime, along with a computer and a cell phone.
Before detailing dates and places – from October 17, 2024, when he first painted a poster in a hallway of the university where he teaches, and until a vague date the following February – the legal text establishes as a “proven fact” that Martín Barroso “from a date not specified exactly, but for several years, had been showing disagreement with the revolutionary and socialist process, mainly because of the measures that, from the economic point of view, have been implemented by the Cuban State.”
Therefore, the ruling continues, he “conceived the illicit idea of creating several posters to display in different locations” both in the municipality of Sancti Spíritus and in the province. The court accuses the professor of having contacted “various YouTubers, primarily based in the United States,” to carry out his actions, using “propaganda from the counterrevolutionary organization abroad,” Autodefensa del Pueblo [People’s Self-Defense Forces], which it describes as “neo-terrorist” and based in Florida.
The text presumes a freedom of expression nonexistent on the island by stating that “instead of expressing his grievances through established legal channels, he chose to create posters with counterrevolutionary content,” taking advantage, it continues, “of the tense situation in our country with the electricity supply.” The judges of the court, in fact, lament that the posters were painted during a blackout.
The text presumes a freedom of expression that does not exist on the Island by saying that “instead of expressing his grievances through established legal channels”
The case of the university professor has come to light at a time when the regime is currently holding record numbers of political prisoners, coinciding with the worsening energy crisis following the fall of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. According to the Madrid-based NGO Prisoners Defenders, there are a total of 1,207 political prisoners, 18 of whom have been imprisoned during this year.
One of the most recent cases of repression is that of Ernesto Medina and Kamil Zayas, members of the El4tico project, who were arrested on February 6 in Holguín for freely expressing their opinions on social media. The videos produced by these young men from Holguín have gone viral, and today their Facebook and Instagram accounts have over 138,000 followers. State harassment against these young men had been brewing for several months prior to their arrest.
On February 4th, a group of Cuban activists submitted a petition to the National Assembly of People’s Power calling for an amnesty law to free political prisoners. The initiative, “For Amnesty Now!”, had, at the time of submission, gathered over 1,500 verified signatures, out of the 10,000 required to request the drafting of such a law.
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