14ymedio, Havana, March 26, 2024 — Sonia Álvarez, mother of political prisoner Sayli Navarro, was arrested for several hours on Tuesday morning at the Jovellanos police station. Álvarez’s arrest was part of the security operations for the visit of Miguel Díaz-Canel to several municipalities in the province of Matanzas, says activist Annia Zamora.
Zamora, mother of Sissi Abascal, a political prisoner who, like Navarro, was convicted of participating in the popular protests of July 11 and 12, 2021, tells 14ymedio that Álvarez had scheduled a visit to the La Bellotex prison where her daughter is imprisoned, but “when I left my house I was arrested without any explanation.”
Sonia Álvarez, who is a member of the Ladies in White and wife of the former prisoner of the Black Spring, Félix Navarro, currently also in prison, spent several hours in detention. “She was released at 11 in the morning without any explanation,” Zamora adds.
“When she was released they told her that she could continue to the prison, but so far we don’t know if she was able to see Sayli”
“They only told her to continue to the prison where her daughter is being held” adds the activist, for whom the arrest had a clear reason: Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel was visiting this Tuesday in several municipalities in the province of Matanzas, including Jovellanos, “a town where they painted the facades, picked up the garbage that had been accumulating in the streets for months and made everything look pretty before his arrival.”
“That mother spent the whole night preparing food for her daughter, and it spoiled because of her arrest, and no one told her why she was arrested,” says Zamora. “When she was released, they told her that she could continue to the prison, but so far we don’t know if she was able to see Sayli.”
Sayli Navarro, Lady in White and activist of the Cuba Decide movement, was sentenced in March 2022 to eight years in prison for the alleged crimes of public disorder, assault and contempt. She had gone to the police station of Perico, the town where she lives with her family, to protest the arrest of demonstrators in the Island-wide ’11J’ protests on 11 July 2021. Her father, Félix Navarro, joined the protest and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Navarro, 70, 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 sent into exile, but Navarro was part of the twelve former prisoners who at that time decided to stay in Cuba.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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