14ymedio, Havana, 22 July 2022 — Daniel Joel Cárdenas Díez, sentenced to 15 years for the protests of July 11, 2021 in Cárdenas (Matanzas), was denied the appeal filed on January 9. According to Marbelis Vázquez speaking to 14ymedio, the lawyer let her know that they had rejected the appeal and that the original sentence of 15 years was maintained.
“I want to say that this six-month wait has been in vain,” Vázquez lamented. “They didn’t even give him a chance for rectification, to give him another hearing,” she declared, before entering the visiting area of the maximum security prison in Agüica, in Colón.
Cárdenas, who during his detention by uniformed special troops, three days after 11J (July 11th 2021), was wounded in the head by a shot and received blows to the chest and back, is in prison for the crimes of sabotage, public disorder and spread of epidemics.
“Now the sentence is final and I am truly disconcerted,” Vázquez explained to CubaNet. The hope of being able to change the fate of Cárdenas was buried after the lawyer’s call. “My children are going to grow up without that father’s love, without a united family, incredible, all this they are doing is unfair.”
In the video that Vázquez recorded the day of the arrest and that she spread on social networks, military personnel are seen carrying small arms while entering the house to arrest Cárdenas.
“They had no mercy on my husband or my children,” Vázquez said in an interview with 14ymedio last May. “I still close my eyes and remember that moment. My children carry with them a trauma that they will never forget.”
During the three-day trial, from December 8 to 10, Cárdenas was treated as “a criminal.” They took him, handcuffed and in leg irons, to a trial that, for Vázquez was “a staged circus with false witnesses.”
The activist Salomé García Bacallao published on her social networks that “the military prosecutor’s office did the same thing with those accused of sabotage in Colón, Matanzas. They also did not have an oral or in person hearing.” And she noted that “firm sentences without change” were given. One of them, that of Rolando Sardiñas, el Koka, was 12 years in prison. “Another violation of due process.”
Aylín, Sardiñas’ sister, indicated that “there was no reduction in the appeal” of the sentence, even though there were irregularities and they charged him with that did not correspond to his actions.” Not even an oral hearing. “Who will give him back those years that they have decided take away?” she wondered.
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