14ymedio, Havana, 27 October 2021 — Activist Nairobis Schery Suárez, wife of Cuban opposition member Manuel Cuesta Morúa, who was reported missing last Monday, told 14ymedio that she was arrested when she left her home and released on Tuesday morning under threats of jail for both her and her husband.
According to her testimony, the man who questioned her made “serious threats about 15N” [November 15] and warned her that both she and Cuesta Morúa could go to prison if they do not abandon their support for the Civic March for Change.
Schery Suárez informed this newspaper that on the day of the arrest she was leaving her house at 10:00 am to visit relatives, but on the way the police stopped the car she was in near the Pan-American Village and took her out of it. “They took my belongings there and I didn’t have time to call my husband to let him know,” she said.
She was then transferred to the Guanabo police unit, where she spent approximately eight hours in an office that, according to her, the officers called ‘the theater.’ “Around eleven o’clock at night they transferred me to the cells until six in the morning, when they took me to an interview with, supposedly, one of the chiefs of the police,” she explains.
“Then they took me to my house in a police car escorted by a ‘Mariana’, as they like to call the women of the Ministry of the Interior who they use to repress activists and who they have also used for acts of repudiation,” adds Schery Suárez.
It is the second time that the activist has been arrested since the call for the march was announced and despite these warnings and threats, Nairobis Schery Suárez told this newspaper that she maintains her support for the march, called for November 15. At the end of September, Cuesta Morúa was also threatened and the political police told him during interrogations that they would not allow the demonstration.
The Archipiélago collective initiative has gathered support in the main Cuban cities, but the repression against activists and citizens who have signed the requests addressed to the provincial governments to carry out the march has increased in recent days. Added to this is a tough campaign in the official media that points to the discredit of its main organizers, accused of being “mercenaries,” and to the mobilization of the government’s repressive forces in view of that day.
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