Cuban Trans Woman Released from Prison Shares Joy & Pain
Diaz was sent to a men’s prison where she spent nearly four years, for protesting during the July 11, 2021 protests.
HAVANA TIMES – When she learned that she would be released, Brenda Díaz, a Cuban trans woman sentenced to more than 14 years in prison after participating in the anti-government demonstrations on 11 July 2021 (11J), she could not pick up the phone to call her mother. Díaz, one of the beneficiaries of the release process recently announced by the Cuban government, was in “shock” when the prison management gave her the news. She had spent almost four of her 30 years in a men’s module and suffered all kinds of “physical and verbal abuse,” she claims in an interview with EFE.
“It was incredible. I couldn’t believe that after three years and seven months in prison, without being able to see the light of the street, without being able to be free, as I have always been, I was going to find everything again. She (her mother) was crying and so was I. I didn’t sleep that night. I made a thousand inventions to sleep and I couldn’t,” she says while holding the hand of her mother, Ana Mary García.
At 6:00 a.m. on January 18, Díaz was reunited with her mother outside the prison. “Today I am a different person. I am not the Brenda I used to be, I feel it inside me,” she says with a serious expression and a look she focuses, from time to time, on the ground.
Diaz sadly reviews, in a withered tone, the list of humiliations she experienced: “I was with eighty men. I was never treated (by the guards) as a trans person, they treated me like ’the inmate, the prisoner’. I said I was a trans woman and they said no: ’You’re a man’. They shaved my head. They didn’t leave a single hair on my head. Not one. And that shocked me greatly. After so much time of being with my feminine image, seeing myself like that… that devastated me,” she says. She was also not allowed to wear women’s underwear, she says.
García, who led a media campaign for the freedom of her daughter, as well as the rest of the prisoners of the 2021 protests, sheds a few tears when she remembers the moment she received the call from Díaz. The entire neighborhood, she says, was scared when they heard her cries of emotion. “The neighbors came thinking that something had happened to me. It was the most emotional moment of my life because I couldn’t see the day when she would be free,” she explains.
Since then, reunions with friends, family and acquaintances have not stopped. García killed a pig they had at home to prepare a meal with all the people who came to celebrate her daughter’s release. She also took advantage of the opportunity to indulge in all those little treats and details that she couldn’t do in prison. Like getting her nails done, long and well painted, as she always had them before her incarceration.
She is aware that her case has made her a symbol for a group that believes it continues to be discriminated against in its own country, despite the approval in 2022 of the Family Code, a package of measures that legalized, among other things, marriage and adoption for same-sex couples. “That (the media coverage of her case on and off the Island) has given me more strength. I think that, in those places, each person should be treated as they are and as they want. That term (trans) is not respected. If I am a trans person, treat me as such,” she says.
Translated by Translating Cuba.