“Goodbye, and we continue in the fight for the freedom of our children and all political prisoners,” said the activist in a farewell audio.
14ymedio, Havana, May 42, 2024 — “I am going to continue fighting from the land of freedom for the freedom of everyone, each and every one.” With those words Ailex Marcano Fabelo, mother of the political prisoner Ángel Jesús Véliz, said goodbye to her loved ones in an audio recording, upon leaving the Island this Thursday.
Martha Beatriz Roque, director of the Cuban Center for Human Rights (CCDH), received a message confirming the departure of Marcano Fabelo but has no further details of her departure. “Goodbye, and we continue in the fight for the freedom of our children and all political prisoners,” was another of the phrases that she dedicated to them in her message.
Ailex Marcano is one of the 11J mothers most active in the fight for the freedom of imprisoned protesters and, therefore, most harassed by State Security.
In May 2022, she was one of the family members who was in Madrid and Geneva, invited by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, to denounce the situation of political prisoners before the Spanish press and the UN. Upon her return to the Island, the authorities subjected her to an interrogation for three hours and confiscated 3,000 pesos (for exceeding the limit of 2,000, then in force).
Marcano was one of the signatories, last March, of the ‘Declaration of Camagüey’
Since then, the harassment by the political police has not stopped. On April 27, she was arrested when she was on her way to visit her son at the Kilo 9 maximum security prison, in Camagüey, where she is serving a six-year sentence for participating in the massive protests on 11 July 2021.
“He has suffered a lot of torture by the political police, which has led him to a mental imbalance, sometimes emotional, and to commit acts, demonstrating against the dictatorship there inside the prison,” she declared in an interview with CubaNet published on May 8th. “That is why they have always denied progress to another regime of minimum severity.”
During that April arrest, the agents took her to Villa María Luisa, the State Security headquarters in the province, where she underwent interrogations and a search for which they forced her to undress. “They threatened to send me to prison because they said that my publications on social networks incited people to take to the streets and for collaborating with ’counterrevolutionary’ organizations such as the Ladies in White. They wanted to make me sign a warning letter, but I refused to do so,” she also told CubaNet.
Marcano was not able to see her son, who was taken to an isolation cell for protesting against his mother’s arrest and his calls were prohibited.
Together with the journalists Henry Constantín and José Luis Tan Estrada, the activists Madelyn Sardiñas and Bárbaro de Céspedes and the actress Iris Mariño, Marcano signed, on March 21, a declaration that included “six steps to save Cuba.” The text, an initiative of the Camagüey-based independent media La Hora de Cuba, included among those steps respect for peaceful demonstrations, the release of political prisoners and the “immediate” call for open and multi-party elections.
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