He was serving a 14-year sentence for “sabotage and public disorder”
14ymedio, Havana, 18 October 2024 — Political prisoner Gerardo Díaz Alonso, 35, who was serving a 14-year sentence for participating in the anti-government protests of 11 July 2021 (’11J’) in Cuba, died this Thursday in the Canaleta high-security prison in Matanzas. The cause of death was a heart attack, according to activist Aylín Sardiña Fernández posting on Facebook.
Díaz Alonso was tried for “sabotage and public disorder” after joining the protests in Cárdenas. Since then, “marked” in the eyes of the regime, the young man has experienced one injustice after another. On the day of his arrest, he was beaten into a patrol car and spent several days incommunicado, in a state of forced disappearance.
The trial was held in December 2021, but he received his sentence on 29 January 2022 without the knowledge of his family, who did not find out about the sanction until the following February 3rd, which prevented him from appealing. “Because it was from the military prosecutor’s office, we had only five days,” his wife, Mercedes Sánchez, explained to 14ymedio, adding that the papers arrived late and they were not even informed of the sanction by phone. Eleven other people were sentenced long with him.
On the day of his arrest, he was beaten into a patrol car and was held incommunicado for several days, in a situation of forced disappearance.
The father of two young children, Díaz Alonso entered prison with a kidney condition, which worsened after he went on a hunger strike to protest his sentence. At the time, his partner told this newspaper that she feared that her husband’s body “would not react very well.”
As soon as he arrived in prison, he was placed in a punishment cell, from which he did not leave until his strike made the authorities nervous. After he was released from confinement, he was taken to an infirmary because his health had worsened. His mother went to visit him during this period. “He became very ill” when she saw him, said Mercedes Sánchez, who also visited the prison at the time: “He was thin, his face had no color and he was moving sideways,” was her description at the time.
Various independent media outlets and organizations have reported on the conditions in which prisoners live on the island. One of them was Cubalex, which last September accused the authorities of “arbitrarily and discretionarily using confinement in punishment cells, and exceeding the time stipulated in their own norms for this practice.” The prisoners suffer “cruel and inhuman treatment.”
In its report, the NGO said that during the first half of this year, at least 26 people died in the island’s prisons – four per month, on average – although the scarce official data forces us to consider that the number is barely a “significant underreporting of the real numbers,” according to the same report. Gerardo Díaz Alonso was added to that list this October, without the authorities having offered any explanation for his death.
During the first half of this year, at least 26 people died in the island’s prisons, four each month, on average.
The extreme conditions in Cuban prisons have also led more than one inmate to commit suicide. This is the case of Yosandri Mulet Almarales, who was also imprisoned for protesting on 11 July 2021, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for sedition. He died in the Julio Trigo hospital in Havana, where he was admitted on August 22 after jumping into the void at the Calabazar Bridge during a parade. In June 2022, he had also tried to take his own life, reported the Cuban Prison Documentation Center. Mulet Almarales was barely 38 years old.
The same organization reported in early September that at least a dozen Cuban political prisoners were at risk of suicide. In another report, it documented three “events of suicidal ideation,” three self-harm incidents, and six attempts to take their own lives among 10 Cuban political prisoners (seven men and three women), since January 1, 2024.
There are a total of 1,113 political prisoners in Cuba, according to the latest count by Prisoners Defenders published on Thursday, which records 62 people incarcerated who “suffer from clinically diagnosed mental health disorders.”
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