14ymedio, Havana, 4 October 2023 — The oral hearing of the trial against the Camagüeyan activist Aniette González was held this Wednesday in Camagüey and was concluded for sentencing. The opponent is accused of the crime of “insulting patriotic symbols,” after she posted photos of herself wrapped in the Cuban flag on social networks.
According to Cubalex, the Prosecutor’s Office, which in its petition requested four years in prison for the 43-year-old woman, alleged that she did not have a garment under the flag when taking the photos, so the images are considered “a lack of respect” for the patriotic symbol.
For her part, González’s lawyer stated that her client “was being judged for her political ideology” and emphasized in her defense that the opponent “was wearing clothes.”
One of the witnesses of the Prosecutor’s Office acknowledged that “he had not seen the photos with the flag very well, because they simply appeared on her Facebook wall, to which he did not pay much attention,” Cubalex adds.
One of González’s daughters told La Hora de Cuba that they were able to enter the trial room only long after the oral hearing had begun.
“The three witnesses for the Prosecutor’s Office didn’t agree; it was total madness,” said the young woman. “One said that breasts could be seen and then retracted that and said breasts couldn’t be seen. Another said that he only saw the posted photos. I don’t know what he was doing there as a witness.”
Similarly, the witness stated that “it was impossible” to know if she had on clothes under the flag
The witness said that “it was impossible to know whether or not she had on clothes under the flag, giving an example: ’At this moment I have on a shirt and shorts under my uniform. I know because I put them on myself, but you who were not present when I put them on, who don’t know what I have on underneath, have no way of knowing what my uniform hides. So I can’t say if she had on clothes under the flag or not.’”
In the photos of Aniette González, which are part of a performance, she is seen standing with her body covered by the flag, and, in another image, she is sitting with her face covered by the flag. With those images, the activist joined the “The flag is everyone’s” campaign, in solidarity with the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, imprisoned in the maximum security prison of Guanajay (Artemisa), for the crimes of outrage to symbols of the homeland, contempt and public disorder.
in the city of Camagüey, Wednesday began with the arrest of the director of La Hora de Cuba, Henry Constantin, to prevent him from covering the trial. The independent media published on its Facebook page that the reporter was detained in a police unit for three hours while his colleague, José Luis Tan Estrada, “was incommunicado” with the same objective.
From the early hours, the court “was surrounded by police and State Security agents. A police patrol was waiting for Henry at the intersection of Cisneros and Hermanos Agüero streets,” the media reported.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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