14ymedio, Luz Escobar, Havana, 2 March 2022 — The opponent Félix Navarro and his daughter, the Lady in White Sayli Navarro Álvarez, received this Wednesday the sentence that resulted from the trial held against both last January. Dissident Manuel Cuesta Morúa has detailed to 14ymedio that father and daughter were sentenced to 9 and 8 years in prison, respectively.
Cuesta Morúa expressed his support to both in on social networks, and reported that the defense has initiated an appeal process.
The opponent also detailed that the prosecution asked for 15 years in prison for Félix Navarro and 11 years for his daughter, released on bail pending trial, and in both cases they are charged with the crimes of public disorder, attack and contempt. “We hope that in some way the appeal will at least lower the sentences because in the end they did nothing, in fact they were objects of violence by the political police,” said the dissident, a member, like Navarro, of the Council for the Democratic Transition in Cuba.
Félix 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 several negotiations between the governments of Spain and Cuba and with the mediation of the Catholic Church, they were released and most went into exile, but Navarro was part of the twelve who decided to stay in Cuba.
Sayli Navarro and her father were arrested on July 12, one day after participating in the July 11th (11J) demonstration in Perico, Matanzas. The arrest occurred violently in the town’s police unit when they went to find out about the situation of other activists detained for following the peaceful protest in San Antonio de los Baños and dozens of other cities throughout the island.
Last August Navarro began a hunger strike in prison that 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.
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