The Young Cuban Man with the Placard, Arrives in Madrid
Accompanying the dissident Luis Robles were his mother, Yindra Elizastigui, and his seven-year-old son.
HAVANA TIMES – Luis Robles Elizastigui, known as “the young man with the placard,” arrived in Madrid this Monday from Cuba, along with his mother, Yindra Elizastigui, and his seven-year-old son. Emotional and exhausted, they declined to make any statements upon arriving at Madrid’s Airport, where 14ymedio witnessed their arrival.
The 32-year-old Havana native, considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was among those released last January during the mass liberation of prisoners as part of an agreement with the Joe Biden administration. At the time, he had not yet completed his term of house arrest—which ended in June—as part of a five-year prison sentence for holding a sign calling for the release of rapper Denis Solís on Havana’s downtown pedestrian boulevard San Rafael on December 4, 2020.
Detained that same day, images of his solitary protest, shared on social media, were later immortalized two months afterward in the Patria y Vida music video. They were also the only incriminating evidence presented by the Prosecutor’s Office during his trial, held nearly a year later in Marianao. He was charged with “resistance” and “enemy propaganda,” despite the video showing that he never struggled with the officers who arrested him, nor did his sign make any reference to an “enemy.” In fact, bystanders around him tried to defend him from the police.
The placard read: “Freedom, no more repression, #FreeDenis,” referring to the rapper who had been sentenced in a summary trial to eight months in prison and was later exiled via Serbia.
According to the verdict, accessed by 14ymedio, the court found it “proven” that Robles “responded to a call” from Cuban influencer Alexander Otaola “to speak out” against the arrest of Solís, “against the police authorities, the leaders of the State and the Government,” and to “carry out any act aimed at destabilizing internal order, publicly demonstrate in the streets against the Cuban economic and social system.”
The court claimed that the phrase written on Robles’s placard “opposed the decisions of the authorities” responsible for Solís’s arrest, according to the Havana Provincial Court, which tried the activist.
The sentence came down on March 28, 2022, almost four months after the trial.
While imprisoned in the high-security Combinado del Este prison, the regime harassed Robles’s family, even detaining one of his brothers, Lester Fernandez, while he was building a small boat. He was fined 7,000 pesos and accused of attempting an “illegal departure from the country,” although no evidence supported the charge, as his mother denounced publicly in early 2023.
For her part, Yindra Elizastigui has been one of the most outspoken mothers advocating for political prisoners—not only her own son. Throughout his imprisonment, she relentlessly denounced the mistreatment Robles endured in prison. “We must continue defending the innocent, because our children and our relatives are innocent. What they did, they did for a right that all human beings possess,” she declared during a live broadcast in May of last year, after her son was again denied the parole to which he was entitled.
A computer science graduate, Luis Robles became better known through his brother, Landy Fernandez Elizastigui, who served as one of his main channels of communication with the outside world. In an interview with 14ymedio, Fernandez said his brother had “always thought differently from the regime.”
Indeed, three days before taking to the streets to protest peacefully, Robles recorded a video—released much later—in which he spoke about his thoughts, hopes, and the reasons that led him to dissent.
“We sincerely wish for change—a change of system, a change of country—because communism has truly turned this country into a living hell, a hell where it’s practically impossible to breathe. Not only to breathe air, but to breathe peace, to breathe tranquility,” he said in the recording.
First published in Spanish by 14ymedio and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.