His innocence was proven “to the point of exhaustion,” his relatives accuse
14ymedio, Havana, 19 September 2024 — Opposition leader José Manuel Barreiro Rouco, arrested in June last year, was finally tried last Monday in the Cienfuegos Provincial Court. The prosecution requested a sentence of two and a half years in prison for the crimes of contempt, and illegal possession and sale of dollars.
The first charge, according to the final petition dated May 22 and released by family members last Saturday, is based on the fact of sharing memes considered offensive and affecting “the honor and integrity of relevant figures of the Cuban Revolution,” including President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
According to the indictment, Barreiro Rouco published in a WhatsApp group called Familly, with 11 people close to him, “images in which degrading epithets were attributed” to Díaz-Canel, Raúl and Fidel Castro. The accusation says that “he also wrote messages in which he declared ‘Homeland and Life’ and ‘Down with Communism’.” Similarly, “he is associated with people who oppose the Cuban revolutionary system, both in the physical and virtual arena, supporting publications on the Facebook page known as Aguada Informar.”
The prosecution says that he also wrote messages in which he declared ’Homeland and Life’ and ’Down with Communism’.
Regarding the illegal possession and sale of dollars, the legal document indicates, briefly, that the activist, “in the first half of June 2023, without being able to establish the exact date,” sold 1,000 dollars and obtained profits of 200,000 pesos, “outside the legally established channels in the country for that activity.”
Jam Pérez, the activist’s nephew, posted on Facebook that Barreiro Rouco, a member of the Citizen Movement for Reflection and Reconciliation, was initially “accused of belonging to a group dedicated to subverting the constitutional order in Cuba.” He added that his “innocence was proven to the point of exhaustion,” so “they tried to fabricate other crimes against him that were also not upheld.”
In the post , he explained that, “already under house arrest, he was notified that he was accused of contempt and currency trafficking,” both accusations, he said, “without any kind of support.” He added that the family was in charge of showing all the elements to prosecutors, lawyers and members of the courts, and “they reached a consensus that none of the accusations are supported.”
Regarding the messages, he added that “while it is true that in the Familly group we shared content that was not in line with the system, it would be worth clarifying that the group, as its name suggests, is strictly family-oriented and nothing and no one is authorized to violate the privacy and intimacy of a family.”
Only someone with all the bad intentions in the world would dare to accuse him of such a thing.
“I don’t believe that my uncle, one of the most intelligent, kind and loving men I have ever met, would have encouraged his family to do such a thing. Only someone with all the bad intentions in the world would dare to accuse him of such a thing,” she said.
Barreiro, 54, a resident of the Aguada de Pasajeros municipality in Cienfuegos, was arrested on June 15 of last year “ without explanation as to why he was detained.” He was held in preventive detention for 90 days, “under investigation” for – it was said at the time – a post he made on Facebook the previous morning, where he denounced that a former State Security agent was entering the United States legally.
After six months in prison – without any request from the prosecutor, trial or case number – “his sentence was changed to house arrest” on December 30, his nephew said.
As of August, the number of political prisoners in Cuba has risen to 1,105, according to the latest monthly report by Prisoners Defenders (PD). In its statement published on Monday, PD emphasized “the horrendous situation that prisoners live in, starving, sick, without medical attention and tortured” and denounced “the lack of food, the lack of medical attention and the denial of medicines.”
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