Cuban agents arrest Vatican-deal releasees—just days after Pope's burial.
A Cuban human rights group says the arrests betray the regime's promise to the Pope. Havana says it's just "enforcing the law." Int'l press coverage is hewing to the regime's storyline—again. Why?
24—30 abril
Based on recent articles in 14ymedio, Aljazeera, OCDH, Martí Noticias
Hola y welcome to CubaCurious.
Sometimes I hate being right.
As I predicted a few weeks ago, leading dissident José Daniel Ferrer is back in a Cuban jail, along with fellow high-profile dissident, Félix Navarro.
Police raided Ferrer’s home at six in the morning Tuesday, violently arresting the dissident, his wife, physician Nelva Ortega, and the couple’s four-year-old son, as well as two activists working in Ferrer’s soup kitchen.
Later Tuesday morning, state security agents arrested Navarro as he left home with his wife to visit their daughter, political prisoner Saily Navarro.
Both men are widely respected by international rights groups for their decades-long nonviolent pro-democracy work. And both men have served years-long sentences as political prisoners, beginning with their arrests during the brutal 2003 Black Spring crackdown. Multiple times during previous incarcerations, Ferrer and Navarro have rejected the government’s offers of freedom in exchange for leaving the country.
“All we are doing is feeding Cubans in need, giving them medicine, tending to their basic needs—things the regime can’t or won’t do. . . “ —Physician Nelva Ortega, wife of dissident-humanitarian José Daniel Ferrer.
Ferrer’s older son, Gabriel Ferrer, said agents violently arrested his father and ransacked their home. Ortega, released along with her young son later on Tuesday, said agents warned her to “protect her son from the family’s activities,” a reference to Ferrer’s pro-democracy activism. She told independent news outlets that agents took the family’s food, cell phones, money, and gas cylinders used to cook soup kitchen meals. “All we are doing is feeding Cubans in need, giving them medicine, tending to their basic needs—things the regime can’t or won’t do. . . “
Ortega said no one would tell her where her husband was being held until late Tuesday night. In a video statement, the physician said an agent who goes by the alias Julio Fonseca intimidated her that evening, threatening that her husband would now have to serve his sentence from the beginning. Human rights groups tracking abuses in Cuba reported that Ferrer had completed his sentence in August 2024, yet was still being held when the Vatican January deal was announced.
So much for the regime’s respect for due process rights.
Ferrer was charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to join the July 2021 peaceful countrywide protests. He had nearly completed his four-and-a-half year sentence when he was released in the January Vatican deal. Navarro was arrested during the same protests when he and his daughter, Saily, went to a local prison to check on the status of detainees.
Those unjust incarcerations are why Ferrer and Navarro—and many dissidents—refuse to comply with the typically vague conditions of their release.
The foreign press in Havana appears to be following the regime’s spin on this story closely. Most articles frame the story the same way: Cuba is enforcing its laws, which the men blatantly disregarded. The reports begin with the Cuban Supreme Court’s arrest ruling, quote the same jurist’s explanation for the arrest, and emphasize the men’s failure to comply reasonable check-ins with the courts.
The articles say nothing about the regime’s violations of the men’s basic human rights or the less savory restrictions of their release, e.g., stay silent, stay offline, don’t travel without permission. Cuba’s well-documented record of human rights violations are also kept out of the picture.
I’ve written here about the regime’s habit of revoking press credentials to correspondents who stray outside the Information Ministry’s prescribed lane on controversial stories, as happened to the Spanish agency EFE in 2021. This story seems to be another victim of the same political agenda.
Various human rights groups have condemned the men’s arrests and provided details that show why original incarcerations, as well as the latest ones, are unjust. The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, a Spanish nonprofit, also linked the men’s arrests to Pope Francis’s death on April 21.
Referring to Cuba’s former and current “presidents,” respectively, the observatory said “Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel didn’t wait even 72 hours after Francis’s burial to undo their commitments.”
The decision to re-incarcerate Ferrer and Navarro, the observatory added, “betrays the Pope’s request.”
We’ve looked into the regime’s betrayals in CubaCurious in the past. The greatest of these may be the betrayal of its most vulnerable citizens, like those Ferrer attempts to feed and Navarro refuses to abandon.
Hasta cuando? How much longer?
Ana
A reminder that now more than ever, Cuba’s political prisoners and their families need your support. Eugenia finished her Madrid marathon Sunday and has received strong support for her fundraiser. If you do donate, please use Thank you or Gracias in the memo field and avoid any references to Cuba or political prisoners. Here’s the link again to her PayPal.
Here’s Eugenia, near the finish line.
And here’s the link to her PayPal page.
Cuban Treat of the Week
Anartia chrysopelea, the Cuban peacock butterfly, is found only in Cuba, although it sometimes strays into southern Florida. A little like Cubans themselves, for better or for worse.
