Luis Robles, “the young man with the placard,” recounts the mistreatment he suffered in prison and the persecution against his family, even after serving his five-year sentence.
Before becoming a political prisoner, Luis Robles was “just another young Cuban struggling to get ahead.” In December 2020, his life changed when he decided to stand on San Rafael Boulevard in Central Havana with a sign demanding an end to repression and the release of rapper Denis Solís, a gesture that landed him in prison. Five years later, in exile in Spain, he recounts for the first time the details of his imprisonment, the physical and psychological torture he suffered and witnessed, and the complete lack of guarantees within the Cuban prison system, in a lengthy interview published by the Cuba X Cuba platform.
Robles begins by explaining the motivations behind his peaceful protest. “When you become a father, you start to think a little differently, to look for better options to provide for your child.” That’s why he decided to go out with a sign. “I wanted to do something to show that I disagreed with the situation, with the repression, the persecution. I thought I would do it in the best way possible so they wouldn’t have grounds to charge me, a peaceful way, without disturbing the peace.” He never imagined everything that would come next.
Robles recounts that he was first held at the Combinado del Este prison, in pretrial detention with common criminals, in “cells with 20 people, in a space of three by four meters, locked up there all day in that small space.” They could only go out to the yard “once or twice a week, for an hour.”
“I wanted to do something to show that I disagreed with the situation, with the repression, the persecution, in a peaceful way, without disturbing the peace.”
He was then transferred to the large cells of the same prison, “spaces for 45 people, it was bunk beds, bunk beds, bunk beds.” There, common criminals awaiting trial lived alongside political prisoners, he recounts. Many who knew his story approached him and “were proud to know that I was the young man who had left” with the sign, he says.
With the guards, it was a different story. “The treatment you receive in prison is dictated by State Security; they treat you as State Security orders.” In his case, the treatment included constant surveillance. “They treated me quite roughly, searching me at any time of day or night.” Although everything he possessed was authorized, “they did it to mess with me,” he adds. “I was documenting the abuses I began to witness in prison, the torture they inflicted on the inmates, the way they punished and instilled fear in the other prisoners, and they started harassing me for that.”
Among those tortures, he recalls “several prisoners who suffered brutal beatings” and “others who, as punishment, were kept handcuffed in front of the bars overnight.” Robles was among those who received the most punishment: “Sometimes they would find me to punish me for no reason. They would chain my hands and feet with special handcuffs they call Shakiras there, which are used more for dangerous prisoners, and they would keep me like that for three or four hours.” On occasion, they would leave him “handcuffed and facing the wall,” and once “from six in the morning until two in the afternoon.” He explains that “it was to hurt me, to torture me, and I discovered that those orders came directly from State Security.”
Part of the pressure stemmed from attempts to turn him into an informant. “The aim was to break you, to get you to submit, to use you as a snitch inside the prison.”
Without me having done anything, they chained my hands and feet with special handcuffs, and kept me like that for 3 or 4 hours, sometimes more, to torture me.
The prison authorities themselves encouraged violence by common criminals against political prisoners. On several occasions, he felt threatened or in danger, especially when he was transferred to a different cellblock, but the other prisoners would warn him: “They’d tell me, ‘Hey, be careful, they sent you here to do this to you.’” But publicly denouncing it offered him some protection. “I told my mom everything that happened to me, and we reported it on social media.” The other prisoners were offered “more food, more phone access… those are the perks in prison,” he says.
The material conditions were also part of the punishment. The food, he says, was “horrible, rotten, with a foul smell that made you want to vomit.” The hamburgers “were green, from lack of refrigeration.”
The medical care was “terrible, terrible, terrible… many times I wasn’t given any medical attention.” They only attended to him “when my mother went and complained… that day they wanted to see me.” The rest was neglect: “they told me there was no medicine, that I should wait there.”
From prison, Robles also witnessed firsthand the wave of repression following the protests of 11 July 2021: “I saw people come in with broken arms, people with gunshot wounds, an elderly man whose arms were broken, a friend whose jaw was dislocated from a beating.” Minors arrived: “17, 18-year-old boys… children, minors who shouldn’t have been in an adult prison.” Many had been arrested for “standing in their doorways” or “filming.”
The food was awful, it was rotten, with a bad smell that made you want to vomit.
Robles was one of those released last January, along with hundreds of other prisoners, as part of an agreement with the Joe Biden administration. He had not yet finished serving his sentence, so he remained under house arrest until last June. But then he discovered that his freedom was a sham: “I was forbidden from expressing any political opinions or speaking about what I experienced in prison.” He was warned that everything would be fine “as long as you don’t talk… you can’t talk about what you experienced in prison… otherwise, you’ll go back to jail,” he says. Throughout his time in Cuba, he endured visits and calls from State Security.
“They came to check on me, to find out how I was thinking.” “They even came into my room, even when I was sleeping, two or three times a month. They came in like they owned the house. Unbearable,” she says.
When the sanction ended, they made it clear to him that any movement he made, even within the country, had to be reported. “I didn’t remain calm: I remained intimidated and silenced until the very last day.”
The repression also reached his family. His brother was imprisoned: “A policeman assaulted him, and now my brother is the one they put in jail, a year there without trial.” For State Security, “my brother was a hostage, he is a hostage,” who remains imprisoned in Cuba, now for attempting to leave the country illegally. They kept telling him: “Remember you have a brother imprisoned there.” His mother, Yindra Elizastigui, who also participates in the interview, suffered pressure and veiled threats.
The feeling of social isolation ultimately drove him to exile. “I felt alone; on my block, the one watching me was my neighbor. Even if I had finished my sentence, I would always have been a prisoner.”
He arrived in Madrid on October 13, 2025, but acknowledges that the aftereffects persist, “that pressure of feeling that an enemy can appear anywhere, the mind is active all the time.”
Even so, Robles believes that “resentment does more harm to the one who carries it than to the one who receives it.” “What I want is for there to be justice in my country. For that criminal, dictatorial, and repressive government to be gone. But I don’t carry resentment,” he affirms.
He sees national reconciliation as difficult but not impossible. The system “first and foremost divided us,” and to rebuild the country, “Cubans have to learn to value themselves as human beings. When we regain the awareness of what it means to be master of oneself, then there will be reconciliation,” he states.
He sends a direct message to young people: “I wouldn’t want any young person to go through what I went through, to waste that time locked up watching their life and health deteriorate. But I do urge people to fight for what they deserve. Let’s start a change of mentality.”
And he concludes with a phrase that he says he will continue to repeat until it is fulfilled: “Freedom for Cuba, freedom for all political prisoners, and freedom for all innocent people.”
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