Alina Barbara Lopez Denounces Her Arrest to the Military Prosecutor’s Office of Matanzas, Cuba

The facts may constitute a crime of “injuries, illegal deprivation of liberty and disclosure of the secret of communications”

Alina Bárbara López Hernández during an interview in April 2023. / EFE

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Havana, 23 April 2024 — Professor Alina Bárbara López Hernández filed a complaint against the four agents who arrested her last week when she was traveling to Havana to hold a protest

The record of receipt of the complaint before the Military Prosecutor’s Office of Matanzas highlights that the reported events “could be related to the commission of the crimes of injuries, illegal deprivation of liberty and disclosure of the secrecy of communications,” all of which are contemplated in the penal code.

“As a victim, I can be part of the process and appoint a lawyer, which I will do,” the intellectual added on her Facebook account.

“As a victim, I can be part of the process and appoint a lawyer, which I will do”

In the document, to which EFE had access, the complainant describes the attacks she suffered from the agents last Thursday at the Bacunayagua police checkpoint, when she was traveling from Matanzas to Havana.

López, 58, claims in the complaint that she was forced to return to Matanzas “for no apparent reason” and that, as she “refused without receiving an explanation,” “they pushed her, hit her” and “they put her into the patrol car through the force.”

Once in the vehicle, the text continues, “after being immobilized in the lying position” they “attacked her by leaning on one of her knees, slapped her and twisted her right hand.”

Then they left her locked up, alone and in the sun for an indeterminate amount of time inside the police vehicle and, when she protested to be let out, one of the officers recorded her on video with his cell phone, which ended up being uploaded to social networks.

The complaint also states that the agent who attended to the historian assured that her arrest was “prophylactic work” and that a medical certificate of injuries was not going to be made because “she would not be charged.”

López also published on her social networks that last Saturday she went to the Faustino Pérez provincial hospital for an examination, since she continued to feel pain.

López also published on her social networks that last Saturday she went to the Faustino Pérez provincial hospital for an examination, since she continued to feel pain. “The X-rays diagnosed me with a right humeral dislocation (sprain of the right shoulder) and is immobilized with a sling, and a subluxation in the thumb of my left hand, which is immobilized with a cast for 21 days,” she added. “All of this is the result of the police brutality that was exercised against me yesterday.”

The professor was traveling to Havana to carry out her protest on the 18th of each month in the Central Park of the capital, which she has been carrying out for more than a year in the Parque de la Fraternidad in Matanzas, where she goes alone and with a sign in white.

For these symbolic protests she has been arrested several times in recent months and as a result, sentenced at the end of last year to pay a fine for the crime of disobedience.

The intellectual has declared herself in “contempt” with that sentence and refused to pay the fine, aware that this could put her in jail, as she has written in different articles on social networks.

The NGO Prisoners Defenders, based in Madrid, denounced that this trial “without guarantees” had “political motivations” and sought only to “repress the exercise of the fundamental rights” of López Hernández, whom it described as a “victim of conscience.”

Furthermore, the intellectual has denounced that she had been ‘regulated’ [the regime’s term of choice for being forbidden to travel] by the Ministry of the Interior and, therefore, was prohibited from leaving the country.

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