14ymedio, Havana, 8 September 2023 — Cuban activist Carlos Ernesto Díaz González, known as ’Ktivo Disidente’, arrived in Miami this Friday thanks to the humanitarian parole program. The opponent was sentenced at the end of November 2022 to two years and six months in prison for the crimes of disobedience and contempt, but last June the regime granted him parole.
Ktivo Disidente was already outside Cuba before flying to South Florida, the activist Nacho Rocha told journalist Mario Pentón, who said that the opponent had left the Island for Nicaragua and then in Mexico received the travel permit to be able to enter the United States with humanitarian parole.
In a video shared by Pentón on his social networks, Ktivo Disidente made his first statement in Miami International Airport, thanking the América TeVé reporter and saying he felt “happy” to be on American soil.
After Ktivo’s release last June, no message had been received from the activist, who was held in the Ariza prison, in Cienfuegos. He requested freedom for political prisoners by climbing on the wall of a playground, on San Rafael Boulevard in Havana last year in April.
During his action, Ktivo launched a harangue in which, in addition, he claimed the right to respect the ideas of others. “There doesn’t have to be violence, there doesn’t have to be bloodshed, but they have to let us participate in the political life of the country. The ones who should not be respected are the communists,” he shouted during his protest, which lasted a few minutes until he decided to get down and the agents who looked at him from below handcuffed him and arrested him.
Previously he also had problems for demonstrating on several occasions in December 2020, asking for the release of Luis Robles, known as “the young man with the placard,” who was sentenced to four years in prison for demonstrating peacefully on the same boulevard of San Rafael.
Another activist who was also sentenced last year, this time to five years in prison for throwing leaflets “proposing elections,” independent journalist Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca, received his first pass to visit his home after more than two years in prison.
Valle Roca, who was convicted of the crimes of “enemy propaganda of a continuous nature and resistance,” told Radio Televisión Martí this Friday that he is in poor health. “I’m deaf, I have memory loss, I’m losing my sight, I’m skinny,” he said and described that in the prison where he is located, “the humidity level is very high and the heat, mosquitoes, bedbugs, mice, rats come out” through the hole in the latrine.
“I now have conditional freedom; these people [the Cuban regime] have not wanted to give me this,” he denounced.
Valle Roca, 62, is the nephew of opposition leader Vladimiro Roca, recently deceased, and the grandson of communist leader Blas Roca Calderío. In the time he has been imprisoned, the reporter has suffered the 15 types of torture described by the Madrid-based organization Prisoners Defenders (PD), which presented a document to the UN denouncing patterns of ill-treatment in Cuban prisons.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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