Niurka Margarita Tabares Valdés requested up to 10 years in prison for three Cuba Primero activists.
14ymedio, Havana, 12 August 2025 — Niurka Margarita Tabares Valdés, the prosecutor for the province of Artemisa, was added this Monday to the list of Cuban repressors compiled by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba. Just a week ago, the official requested sentences of up to 10 years in prison for three members of the Cuba Primero organization, José Antonio Pompa López, Daniel Alfaro Frías, and Lázaro Mendoza García, accusing them of crimes of propaganda against the constitutional order, association, assembly, and unlawful demonstrations.
“As in other trials in Cuba involving the crime against humanity of politically motivated persecution, Attorney General Tabares Valdés indulged in the prevarication of proposing long and unjust sentences, knowing they were just that, following the script set by the political police,” the organization said in a statement issued Monday.
The document includes excerpts from the resolution in which Tabares Valdés describes some of the items seized from the accused, including 95 stickers with the logo “Act Against Violence,” “nine membership cards of the opposition movement For a New Republic,” and seven sweaters, two of them black and five white, with the logo of the organization Cuba Primero, with the phrase “Violence” and an X above it. In addition, the Prosecutor’s Office argues that Pompa López has received funding from abroad.
The three defendants were incarcerated in the Guanajay and Combinado del Este prisons in early 2024 and spent more than a year and a half in pretrial detention without trial. The trial was finally held on August 5th and is ready for sentencing, but so far, only the Prosecutor’s Office’s request is known: 10 years for Daniel Alfaro Frías, 8 for José Antonio Pompa López, and five for Lázaro Mendoza García.
Tabares Valdés “accused the defendants, whose crime is having distributed anti-government leaflets, of being financed and directed from abroad.”
Tabares Valdés “accused the defendants, whose crime is having distributed anti-government leaflets, of being financed and directed from abroad, because it cannot be publicly admitted that Cubans on the island are rebelling against a regime that keeps them mired in the worst crisis in Cuba’s history, suffering from hunger, blackouts, lack of water, medicine, and housing, amid rampant insecurity, and that clings to power through pure repression,” the foundation’s statement added.
Dozens of Cubans have already been sanctioned for inciting against the constitutional order since the new Penal Code was approved in 2022, the text states, highlighting how it is possible to end up accused of this type of crime simply for stating their political opinions in writing on social media.
“The represorescubanos.com project aims to continue denouncing, collecting personal data, and shaming, through its interactive database, all those officials who compromise their integrity by issuing these life-destroying sentences only to continue profiting from the leftovers of the feast the regime leaves them,” the statement said, addressing citizens who collaborate with the regime in one way or another, reminding them that this is the time to say no and oppose committing irreparable injustices.
The Foundation has been compiling this list for years , which includes, among many others, prison officials who have made decisions that harmed or damaged the physical and moral integrity of political prisoners; judges and prosecutors who have made unfounded or simply unfair accusations against opponents; doctors who refused to provide treatment options in the exterior; and, of course, military personnel and members of the Party and government who form a key part of the regime’s leadership.
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