Cuba takes up the releases promised to Pope Francis

The Cuban regime resumed this Thursday the releases promised to Pope Francis, initiated in early January and in which at least the imprisoned participants of the protests of July 11, 2021 are expected to be released.

This is the case of Andy Alexis Martín Pérez, a 11J protester who served his ten -year -old sentence of deprivation of liberty in the agüica clan prison near Columbus, where he resides.

«With me they released four others, a girl and three men, but they had no political crimes, the girl was for embezzlement and men for theft with force,» he said.

«The reeducator of mine said they were going to continue to release, that no one was going to be left.»

The Operation Dignity is the procedure of prison agents against the attendees of the massive demonstrations of 2021 to those who submitted to coercion to express, in front of the rest of the criminal population, their regret for having participated in the social outbreak.

Cuban authorities insist on denying their status as political prisoners, rejecting the proposals, national and international, amnesty for them.

“You have to work, behave well. You are one step away from the prison again. Another thing would be an pardon, since they would erase you from the system, but now you have to behave better than when you were on the street. ”

Among the obligations imposed on the releases is “not publishing on social networks, not making statements to the press, not approaching human agglomerations, not collaborating with activities qualified by the regime as counterrevolutionary, mandatory work, and reporting to the courts”.

The releases were suspended at the end of January, after the departure of prison of around 172 people, according to the verifications of the NGO Justice 11J.

“When they stopped, we thought they were going to continue later. In prison they said that that had nothing to do with Trump’s and the list of sponsoring terrorism countries, but with the Pope. Then we were waiting. I always knew that something could happen and that they were going to release us, ”said Martín Pérez.

They also came out probation this Thursday, from the prison of Bladato, Iván Arocha Quiala, resident in the town of Santiago el Caney; From the east combined, Brusnelvis Adrián Cabrera Gutiérrez, and of the Women’s Prison of the West, in the Guatao, Yaquelín Castillo García, of Havana.

The three, like Martín Pérez, participants of the protests of 2021.

Another political prisoner, Ohaurys Rondón Riveromember of the opposition movement for a new Republic (Monr), it was also released this Thursday, from a forced labor field in Havana, according to Martí News.

Rondón Rivero said he was released along with 29 common prisoners, all from the Correctional Camp Cetem, in the 1580 prison of the Cuban capital.

Independent groups have informed more than a thousand political prisoners, mostly sentenced for participating in the protests of 2021, while the official figures, say that 381 Cubans were punished by the facts «that threatened against the constitutional order and stability of our socialist state», in that year.