His innocence was proven “to the point of exhaustion,” his relatives accuse
14ymedio, Havana, 19 September 2024 — Opposition leader José Manuel Barreiro Rouco, arrested in June last year, was finally tried last Monday in the Cienfuegos Provincial Court. The prosecution requested a sentence of two and a half years in prison for the crimes of contempt, and illegal possession and sale of dollars.
The first charge, according to the final petition dated May 22 and released by family members last Saturday, is based on the fact of sharing memes considered offensive and affecting “the honor and integrity of relevant figures of the Cuban Revolution,” including President Miguel Díaz-Canel.
According to the indictment, Barreiro Rouco published in a WhatsApp group called Familly, with 11 people close to him, “images in which degrading epithets were attributed” to Díaz-Canel, Raúl and Fidel Castro. The accusation says that “he also wrote messages in which he declared ‘Homeland and Life’ and ‘Down with Communism’.” Similarly, “he is associated with people who oppose the Cuban revolutionary system, both in the physical and virtual arena, supporting publications on the Facebook page known as Aguada Informar.”
The prosecution says that he also wrote messages in which he declared ’Homeland and Life’ and ’Down with Communism’.
Regarding the illegal possession and sale of dollars, the legal document indicates, briefly, that the activist, “in the first half of June 2023, without being able to establish the exact date,” sold 1,000 dollars and obtained profits of 200,000 pesos, “outside the legally established channels in the country for that activity