After being released from Guamajal prison in Santa Clara city, former prisoner José Rodríguez Herrada, 52, was welcomed with joy at his home by family and friends.
14ymedio, Havana, 15 September 2024 — José Rodríguez Herrada, sentenced to three years and six months for participating in the mass protests in Caibarién, Villa Clara, on 11 July 2021, was discharged from prison on Friday. After his release from Guamajal prison in Santa Clara city, the 52-year-old ex-convict was joyfully welcomed home by family and friends.
Rodriguez Herrada, who before his arrest worked as a bricklayer, considers that the reasons to demonstrate are still present in Cuba: “If the situation continues like this, people will not be able to stand it any longer, although there is also a lot of fear because of the repression,” he warns in a telephone conversation with 14ymedio. “My town of Caibarién is much worse, there is no water, you have to walk around with a bag of money to buy food, the streets are destroyed, the houses are falling apart.”
Convicted under the crime of public disorder, Rodriguez Herrada’s appeal was rejected and he had to spend almost the entirety of his sentence behind bars. “I got out four months early because I was entitled to it, not because they were kind to me, or anything like that,” he explained to this newspaper regarding his stay in Section 5 of the Guamajal Men’s Prison.
I got out four months early, because I was entitled to it, not because they were kind to me, or anything like that,” he says
His time in prison was full of hard times, as he explains. In January 2022, Rodríguez Herrada carried out a hunger strike in the Villa Clara prison called “El Pre.” With his fasting, the prisoner demanded the nullification of the testimonies against him provided by prosecution witnesses in the trial held in November 2021, considering them false and fabricated in order to convict him.
According to sentence 137 of 2021, to which this newspaper had access, the head of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) unit of Caibarién, Ariel López Águila and Yandier Moreno Urbay, a Political Officer of the Ministry of the Interior in the te