Luis Robles, the young Cuban who came out to demonstrate with a banner, was sentenced to five years in prison

A young Cuban man who took to the streets in December 2020 with a banner demanding the release of a rapper was sentenced to five years in prison, according to the sentence to which the AFP news agency had access on Wednesday night.

On December 4, 2020, Luis Robles, now 29, walked out onto a street in downtown Havana with a handwritten banner that read: “Freedom/no + repression/free Denis”. Shortly after he was arrested and since then he has been in prison.

“The defendant Luis Robles Elizástegui is punished for the crimes of enemy propaganda and disobedience committed intentionally (...) to a penalty of five years of deprivation of liberty”, states the document dated March 28.

“We denounce the five-year prison sentence against Luis Robles Elizástegui. Once again, judges in the service of the @PartidoPCC (Communist of Cuba) unjustly punish a young Cuban man for exercising his rights to free demonstration and expression,” the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights, based in Spain, said on Twitter.

Robles was protesting against the imprisonment of Cuban rapper Denis Solis, who was released on July 12, 2021, a day after the historic demonstrations in which thousands of Cubans took to the streets demanding “Freedom” and the cry of “We are hungry”.

These protests left, in addition to one dead and dozens injured, 1,395 detainees, of whom 728 remain imprisoned, according to the Miami-based human rights NGO Cubalex.

Many protesters have received sentences of up to 30 years for crimes such as sedition, attack and public disorder.

Both the United States and the European Union have criticized these arrests and have called on the Cuban authorities to release political prisoners.

(With information from AFP)

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