A Bricklayer Reflects on Cuba After Three Years in Jail
‘If the situation continues like this, people won’t be able to take it anymore’
After being released from Guamajal prison in Santa Clara city, Jose Rodriguez Herrada, 52, was welcomed with joy at his home by family and friends.
HAVANA TIMES – Jose Rodriguez Herrada, sentenced to three years and six months for participating in the mass protests in Caibarién, Villa Clara, on 11 July 2021, was discharged from prison on Friday. After his release from Guamajal prison in Santa Clara city, the 52-year-old ex-convict was joyfully welcomed home by family and friends.
Rodriguez Herrada, who before his arrest worked as a bricklayer, believes that the reasons to demonstrate are still present in Cuba: “If the situation continues like this, people will not be able to stand it any longer, although there is also a lot of fear because of the repression,” he warns in a telephone conversation with 14ymedio. “My town of Caibarién is much worse, there is no water, you have to walk around with a bag of money to buy food, the streets are destroyed, the houses are falling apart.”
Convicted under the crime of public disorder, Rodriguez Herrada’s appeal was rejected and he had to spend almost the entirety of his sentence behind bars. “I got out four months early because I was entitled to it, not because they were kind to me, or anything like that,” he explained to this newspaper regarding his stay in Section 5 of the Guamajal Men’s Prison.
His time in prison was full of hard times, as he explains. In January 2022, Rodríguez Herrada carried out a hunger strike in the Villa Clara prison called “El Pre.” With his fasting, the prisoner demanded the nullification of the testimonies against him provided by prosecution witnesses in the trial held in November 2021, considering them false and fabricated in order to convict him.
According to sentence 137 of 2021, to which this newspaper had access, the head of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) unit of Caibarién, Ariel López Águila and Yandier Moreno Urbay, a Political Officer of the Ministry of the Interior in the territory, assured the Court that José Rodríguez Herrada, together with activists Carlos Michael Morales and Javier Delgado Torna led a large group of people who “shouted slogans against the Government” and incited other neighbors to join the protest.
Although the three defendants acknowledged their participation in the demonstration, they did not admit to having been the main protagonists. They only “joined a group of young people who had already initiated such acts” but their statements were dismissed.
Last March, the Patmos Institute denounced that Rodriguez Herrada had been denied the right to religious assistance. “This past March 18, a religious service was being held there, which they allow every month, and the chief officer of the correctional officers, Israel Lebrán, rejected José Rodríguez Herrada’s right to participate.”
In recent months, several of those convicted for the 11J protests have been released from prison after serving their sentences. Among them is activist Angélica Garrido, who was released on July 10, one day before the third anniversary of the anti-government protests for which she was imprisoned and after having served her sentence in its entirety. In prison remains her sister, writer María Cristina Garrido, who still has to serve four of the seven years of her sentence.
Carlos Michel Morales Rodríguez, an activist and independent journalist, was released from prison last March after spending two years and ten months behind bars.
Also released from prison in January of this year was political prisoner Yusmely Moreno González, sentenced to three years in prison for also participating in the 11J demonstrations, which in her case took place in the town of Surgidero de Batabanó, in the province of Mayabeque.
“Freedom on completion,” so read the brief document Moreno González received upon her discharge from the Villa Delicia work camp in Havana, where she had been transferred after spending most of her sentence in the Western Women’s Prison, also known as El Guatao.
During the third anniversary of 11J, the Madrid-based NGO Prisoners Defenders used the occasion to detail that in the last three years, they have accounted for a total of 1,728 political prisoners. Of these, “150 were listed as political prisoners at the beginning of July 2021 and 1,578 have been new additions to the list during these three years, while there are 611 among the total monitored by our organization who have since served their sentences in their entirety.”
Translated by LAR for Translating Cuba.