14ymedio, Havana, 19 April 2022 — The Lady in White Sayli Navarro Álvarez entered prison this Monday, after losing the trial on appeal of the sentence received last March for public disorder, attack and contempt, for participating in the peaceful demonstrations of July 11th (11J). Her father, Félix Navarro, in provisional prison since last July, also had his sentence ratified.
The father was sentenced to nine years in prison and the daughter to eight, in a trial held in January in Jovellanos, Matanzas.
As Rosa María Payá, promoter of Cuba Decide, assured in a tweet, Sayli Navarro was taken to jail “chained hand and foot” directly from the court and she was unable to say goodbye to her mother. Her father was returned to his cell in the Agüica maximum severity prison, in Matanzas.
Hours earlier, Payá had published a photo of the Lady in White, with whom she was speaking as she arrived at court, adding that it might be “the last photo of Sayli Navarro.”
The arrest of the father and daughter, on July 12, occurred in a violent manner at the police unit in Perico, Matanzas, when they went to find out about the situation of other activists arrested for joining the protests the day before, which multiplied in dozens of other cities throughout the Island.
Last August, Félix Navarro, who, unlike his daughter, had to await trial in jail, began a hunger strike which he ended at the end of September in protest at his unfair imprisonment.
At that time, his daughter denounced that he was in a “very delicate” state of health and that for that reason, after 25 days, he abandoned it.
Navarro, 68, was one of the political prisoners of the Black Spring of 2003, when 75 opponents and independent journalists received long prison sentences. In 2011, as a result of various negotiations between the governments of Spain and Cuba and with the mediation of the Catholic Church, they were released and sent into exile, but Navarro was one of the twelve former prisoners who decided to stay in Cuba.
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