The artist and freelance reporter was arrested in December 2022 while lining up to buy chicken.
14ymedio, Madrid, 4 May 2025 — “My people, our brave brother Ángel Cuza has just been released from prison.” With these words, activist Thais Franco announced the release this Saturday of the artist and independent reporter Luis Ángel Cuza Alfonso, after a year and a half of incarceration in the Combinado del Este prison in Havana.
According to the Cultural Rights Observatory (ODC), his release from prison came after he fully served the one-and-a-half-year sentence imposed on him in November 2023, along with Lázaro Rolando Kessel Barrueto and Yasser Rivero Bonn, in a trial that human rights organizations determined was riddled with irregularities.
Cuza was arrested in December 2022 outside a store in the capital, while waiting in line to buy chicken. He was accused of “disturbing public order” for carrying “sticks and stones,” a charge both he and eyewitnesses denied. While awaiting trial, which ended almost a year later, he was released on bail of 20,000 Cuban pesos.
The ODC reported that the reporter “was the victim of numerous acts that violated his most basic rights” while he was at Combinado del Este.
The ODC reported in its publication that the reporter, a CubaNet contributor, “was the victim of numerous acts that violated his most basic rights” while he was in Combinado del Este, a maximum-security prison. As an example, they explain that, at the end of October 2024, he was beaten and imprisoned for almost a month for joining a protest initiated by fellow artist and political prisoner Duannis León Taboada.
Known for being one of the participants in the Obispo Street protest on April 30, 2021 —in solidarity with artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who was forcibly confined to the Calixto García Hospital at the time —Cuza has been harassed by State Security ever since.
On May 6, 2022, he was arrested by the political police along with activist Pedro Quiala for broadcasting live from the Saratoga Hotel, which had been destroyed hours earlier in an explosion, the specific cause of which is still unknown. Both were then transferred to Villa Marista, the headquarters of State Security in Havana, where they were interrogated, something that the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights denounced at the time as arbitrary detentions.
____________
COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.