14ymedio, Havana, 21 September 2021 — The Municipal Prosecutor’s Office of Jovellanos requested a sentence of six years of deprivation of liberty for the Lady in White Sissi Abascal Zamora after her participation in the demonstrations on July 11 (11J). According to the official document, dated September 15, which 14ymedio had access to before the opposition opened it to the public on its Facebook profile, Abascal, age 23, is accused of the crimes of attack, contempt and public disorder public for protesting in the park of the town of Carlos Rojas, in Matanzas.
The accusation against the young opponent, member of the Pedro Luis Boitel Democracy Party, was lodged by Silvia Martínez Monteroa, the major of the National Revolutionary Police of the municipality of Jovellanos.
The document, received by the activist on Tuesday, specifies that Abascal is currently in home confinement as a precautionary measure and pending trial. It also points out that during the protests she shouted phrases such as: “Patria y Vida,” “down with the Castros” and “down with the Revolution,” and that she “asked the local people to join her.”
The Prosecutor’s Office also reproaches her for going out to protest “despite knowing the difficult situation the country was going through” due to the “measures to intensify the economic blockade by the United States Government” and “the defamatory campaign organized from that nation to destabilize the economic and social order of the country.”
“They are fabricating these crimes for me, because at no time did I hit officer Silvia Martínez Montero and she is accusing me of having done it. We were the victims. My sister’s head was broken, my mother was hit everywhere and my father was unjustly imprisoned for 47 days,” she denounces.
“I am peaceful. I raise my voice and I will continue shouting what I shouted that day: ’Change’, ’freedom’, ’down with the Castros’,’ down with the dictatorship’, ’Díaz-Canel singao [motherfucker]’, ’freedom for all political prisoners’, ’Long live free Cuba,’ ’patria y vida’, she added.
The Prosecutor’s Office also explains in the document that Abascal placed a white sheet on the branch of a tree in the park that read “Patria y Vida,” while the protesters shouted “phrases against the revolutionary process” and expressions such as “henchmen,” “murderers,” “police officers” and “also banging on pots and pans with sticks.”
At another moment, they claim that the activist “pushed officer Martínez Montero in the chest” and, when she fell to the pavement, “took the opportunity” to hit her “repeatedly with her fists.”
So far, the Cuban government has not recognized official figures of detainees, injuries or deaths as a result of the 11J protests. It only admitted the death of Diubis Laurencio Tejeda, 36, a resident of the Havana municipality of Arroyo Naranjo.
Among the hundreds of anonymous citizens who came out on July 11 to protest were also several of the main figures of Cuban dissidence. who were also detained. Among them, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement; Félix Navarro, from the Democratic Action Unity Table; and José Daniel Ferrer, from the Patriotic Union of Cuba.
According to a list drawn up by several volunteers under the coordination of the Cubalex legal advice center, of the more than 1,000 detainees from those days, 533 are still in jail.
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