The Prisoner, His Mother and Cuban Government Cruelty
The political prisoner asked the Cuban government to grant him leave to visit his terminally ill mother and say goodbye. There was no way, and she died.
By Rafael Rojas (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Jose Gabriel Barrenechea is a Cuban journalist and activist who was detained in the town of Encrucijada, Las Villa, for having protested publicly in November 2024 against the successive blackouts. He’s just one among thousands of cases of people that the Cuban government locks up and puts on trial for peacefully expressing their unhappiness as citizens over the lack of freedoms on the island.
Barrenechea is known for his reports on the Cuban situation that appeared in several independent media platforms. Durning the widespread protests of 2021 and 2022, his reports were of great value in sketching a credible map of the citizen discontent. The popular protests didn’t end in Cuba after 2021 – diverse human rights organizations counted nearly seventy repressed demonstrations in 2024.
In the last few weeks, the independent media in Cuba reported that Barrenechea’s mother, Zoila Esther Chavez, was at home in seriously failing health, with advanced bladder cancer. The political prisoner asked the Cuban government to authorize a brief leave from prison, in order to visit his sick mother and say goodbye to her. There was no way the island’s authorities could be convinced to bend, and the prisoner’s mother passed away on May 4th.
Unfortunately, the events of that weekend in Cuba represent an ever more common situation. There are constant complaints about the lack of basic humanitarian guarantees for those on the island who peacefully oppose the absence of civil and political rights. To make things worse, the global press is ever more willing to ignore or simply overlook these events that have become routine.
Clearly, it makes more sense for those press agencies to highlight that the Secretary General of Morena [Mexican governing political party], Caroline Rangel, has signed a cooperation agreement with the Cuban Communist Party. Speaking about the revival of this cooperation “among progressive forces,” the Mexican leader stated: “Cuba is a living example that another world is possible when human beings are placed at the center, just as the Fourth Transformation promotes Mexican humanism.”
The press that serve this Mexican humanism, of course, give more importance to the agreement between the Morena Party and the Cuban Communist Party than to news of the death of a political prisoner’s mother. For their part, the Cuban press itself displays its habitual opacity regarding any news that clashes with the daily triumphalism that sings the grandeur of Cuban socialism. Instead, during these days, they’ve been proudly reporting all the details of Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel’s visit to St. Petersburg.
Once again, beginning with this official visit of the Cuban Head of State to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, there are announcements of dozens of new agreements for trade, scientific, and technical collaboration. But later, the much-heralded take-off of our new ties with the Kremlin won’t be reflected in the large numbers of the Cuban macroeconomy, which continues registering an endless crisis.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posed in English by Havana Times.