The families of Daniel Alfaro Frías, José Antonio Pompa López, and Lázaro Mendoza García accuse the trial of being “rigged.”
14ymedio, Havana, 6 October 2025 — The Havana Provincial Court has sentenced opposition figures Daniel Alfaro Frías, José Antonio Pompa López, and Lázaro Mendoza García to nine, eight, and five years in prison, respectively. The Cuban American National Foundation reported this Monday, acknowledging the family members’ complaint that the trial was “rigged.”
Prosecutor Niurka Margarita Tabares Valdés had requested up to 10 years in prison for “propaganda against the constitutional order,” “association,” “meeting,” and “illegal demonstrations.” For this reason, the official was added on August 12th to the list of Cuban repressors compiled by the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba.
The evidence presented at trial consisted of 95 stickers with the logo “Act Against Violence,” “nine membership cards of the opposition movement For a New Republic,” and seven shirts, two of them black and five white, bearing the logo of the organization Cuba Primero, with the phrase Violence and an X above them.” In its report, the Prosecutor’s Office argued that one of them, Pompa López, “has received funding from abroad.”
The evidence presented at trial consisted of 95 stickers bearing the logo “Act Against Violence”
Relatives of the three convicted men told Martí Noticias that they will pursue every last resort for their defense. They have five days to file an appeal, starting the day after the ruling is notified.
“They are three peaceful men who have fought against this regime for more than 15 years, demanding freedom for our people and demanding that human rights not be violated. It is all because they are part of the Cuba First movement, but they have always shown, and we have always shown, that our struggle is peaceful,” said Suarmi Hernández, Pompa López’s wife.
The three convicted men were held in pretrial detention without trial for more than a year and a half in the Guanajay and Combinado del Este prisons, where they were interned in early 2024.
“Their crime is having distributed anti-government leaflets, being financed and directed from abroad, because it cannot be publicly admitted that Cubans on the island are rebelling against a regime that keeps them mired in the worst crisis in Cuba’s history, suffering from hunger, blackouts, lack of water, medicine, and housing, amid rampant insecurity, and that clings to power through sheer repression,” stated the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba when including the prosecutor on its list of repressors.
“It cannot be publicly admitted that Cubans on the island are rebelling against a regime that keeps them subservient.”
Dozens of Cubans have been sanctioned so far for inciting against the constitutional order since the new Penal Code was approved in 2022, the foundation said, questioning whether anyone could be charged with these types of crimes “simply for recording their political opinion in writing on social media.”
The organization has been compiling this list for years, which includes, among many others, prison officials who have made decisions that harmed or damaged the physical and moral integrity of political prisoners; judges and prosecutors—many of them based in the United States —who have made unfounded or simply unfair accusations against opponents; doctors who refused to provide treatment options abroad; and, of course, military personnel and members of the Party and government who are part of the regime’s top leadership.
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