Cuba’s Prosecutor Asks for 3 & 4 Years for Two Brave Women
Alina Barbara Lopez and her colleague Jenny Victoria Pantoja reject the charges and denounce a politically motivated setup.
HAVANA TIMES – Almost a year after the events, the Cuban Public Prosecutor’s Office has presented its provisional conclusions in the case of dissident intellectual Alina Barbara Lopez Hernandez and her colleague Jenny Victoria Pantoja Torres, accused of several crimes following an incident with Interior Ministry officials on June 18, 2024. The complaint was published by López herself on her Facebook profile, where she calls the process a “judicial farce” and denounces the political nature of her arrest.
According to the document presented by prosecutor Ana Lilian Caballero Arango before the Criminal Section of the People’s Municipal Court of Matanzas, it is requested that an oral trial be opened against both women, who will have to answer for the crimes of attack, disobedience and disrespect, according to the Cuban Penal Code.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office requests a joint sentence of four years’ imprisonment for López Hernández, replaced by correctional work without internment, in addition to a ban on leaving the country and other ancillary sanctions. In the case of Pantoja Torres, a three-year sentence is requested, also replaced by correctional work.
Both must also repair alleged material damage to the officer who filed the complaint: 650 Cuban pesos for a damaged uniform and 5,000 pesos for hair extensions, according to the indictment.
Lopez denounces that the text presented by the prosecutor is “badly written”, full of errors, and qualifies its content as a script of “action and violence” in which she herself is represented as a “female version of Bruce Lee.” According to the intellectual, the official narrative falsifies the facts and conceals the real intent: repression against political dissent in Cuba.
“We were the ones beaten, attacked and treated like animals. I feared for my life that day,” wrote López, who claims to continue suffering physical consequences of the aggression, including inflammation of the inner ear, which causes balance problems and vertigo and can lead, in some cases, to hearing loss.
According to her account, both she and Pantoja were intercepted while traveling to Havana in exercise of their civil rights. The arrest, she says, was ordered by state security agencies, although the prosecutor tries to present it as an incident with no political connotation.
Lopez questions the use of common crimes to cover up what she considers political persecution. “The infamous script of prosecutor Caballero Arango aims to strip what happened of its political nature, which is more than obvious,” she says. “It is a repeated strategy: transform the exercise of constitutional rights into common crimes in order to maintain that there are no political prisoners in Cuba”.
Also an essayist and university professor, she has been one of the most visible critical voices in contemporary Cuban thought. For several years, she has been systematically denouncing violations of fundamental rights on the Island and promoting dialogue and democratic transformation in the country.
Although there is still no date for the trial, López warns that when it takes place, “it will be the 2019 Constitution that will sit, once again, in the dock of the accused.” The Cuban Constitution recognizes rights such as freedom of expression and association, but also establishes the irrevocable nature of the socialist, one-party system, which for the accused constitutes an unsurmountable contradiction.
“Dictatorships cannot disguise themselves as democracies, even if they try,” she says in her complaint, which ends with a call for solidarity: “We will need support and accompaniment in this shameful process”.
Alina Barbara Lopez and Jenny Victoria Pantoja have said that in the next few days they will publish a joint statement on their position regarding the prosecution’s charges.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.