By Vicente Morin Aguado
HAVANA TIMES – Generally speaking, repressive dictatorial regimes tend to register fewer victims among women, including a lesser quantity of long prison sentences for women. The news from Cuba, however, contradicts the above impression.
On April 18, on the Havana-Matanzas highway, PhD in philosophy Alina Barbara Lopez Hernandez, 58, was detained without charges and with no explanation whatsoever. When she asked the reason for such an illegal proceeding, not unlike several bitter experiences she’d had previously, the response from a policewoman was to employ martial arts and knock her down onto the pavement.
The university professor later recounted: “I’m quite tall, and I hit the ground very hard. I fell on my back, and for a moment my eyes clouded over, and I felt something like the taste of blood in my throat.”
According to the victim, three agents then dragged her to the police patrol car and violently attempted to shove her inside. In the struggle, the desperate academic grabbed the epaulette of the police agent “That’s now one of the elements they’re using to accuse me of assault, because I pulled off her insignia.”
In other words, the victim has now become the criminal, with a fabricated criminal charge of assault now pending against her.
Why such a savage procedure against a defenseless woman? Because Alina Barbara Hernandez is a person who abides closely to the law, well educated, with the good manners of a university professor, yet who publicly expresses her rejection of despotism.
The crime of assault is one of the charges most often used by the repressors. It was similarly applied to Lizandra Gongora Espinosa, who was persecuted for 18 days following her participation in the multitudinous demonstrations of July 11, 2021. A Major in Cuba’s Interior Ministry was dispatched to declare, with no other proof than his words, that the 35-year-old mother of five children had thrown a rock at him.
A commitment to non-violence is a