14ymedio, Havana, 4 May 2017 — State Security prevented Belkis Cantillo, the leader of the Dignity Movement, from boarding a flight to the United States on Wednesday afternoon. The activist explained to 14ymedio via telephone that State Security agents and immigration officials notified her that she was “restricted.”
Cantillo explained that she tried to travel for health reasons because for some time she has felt “badly in the kidneys.”
According to the Dignity Movement leader, the clerk at the American Airlines check-in counter in Frank Pais International Airport in Holguin told her that she had to follow her and led her to an office where officials from State Security and Immigration were waiting for her.
Although the activist did not receive any official documents that supported a travel restriction, the agents indicated that she should leave the airport at the end of the interrogation. On her way home, she noticed that the car in which she was returning to Santiago de Cuba was being “escorted” by the political police.
Cantillo, who lives in Palmarito de Cauto, in Santiago de Cuba province, denounced that since the emergence of the Dignity Movement, she and the other activists have had to resist the constant persecution of State Security.
Earlier this year, Cantillo was detained for four days and on January 14, the founding day of the Dignity Movement, she was expelled, along with a group of women, from the Shrine of the Virgin of the Charity of Cobre.
Since then, says the opponent, the “threats” have not stopped and several homes have been “raided” by State Security and police.
The Dignity Movement is demanding an immediate unconditional amnesty for all those currently imprisoned for “pre-criminal dangerousness” and the elimination of this “arbitrary” concept from the Penal Code.
