From our Bureau of Socialist Social Justice
Here’s what can happen to you in a socialist worker’s paradise: You can end up spending five years in prison for merely expressing your thoughts while waiting for food in a long queue.
This is what has happened to Yandier García Labrada, who has already spent one year in prison alongside dangerous crimininals and has been refused medical care for his COVID infection.
Yandier was found guilty of the following crimes for complaining about food shortages: contempt, attack on authority and epidemic-spreading. Yes. THIS is what all socialists and communists mean by “social justice”.
Abridged and loosely translated from Marti Noticias.
Cuban political prisoner Yandier García Labrada, 35, served a year in prison on Wednesday in the Provincial Prison of Las Tunas, known as El Typico, despite the intense campaign deployed to secure his release.
The peasant, a member of the Christian Liberation Movement (MCL), was sentenced in July to 5 years in prison for the crimes of contempt, attack on authority and spread of epidemics, after he protested on October 6, 2020 while standing in line to buy food in a Manati store.
The MCL denounced that the trial was full of irregularities and has been carrying out an international campaign to denounce this injustice and the arbitrariness surrounding the arrest and imprisonment of the opponent, as explained in the Radio Martí News by Dr. Eduardo Cardet, National Coordinator of this group opponent, founded by Oswaldo Payá (1952-2012).
Dr. Cardet revealed that about 15 days ago, García Labrada fell ill with COVID-19 and was kept in prison, in his cell, without adequate medical assistance.
“Currently we do not know the actual state of health,” he stated.
Doctor Cardet, released in May 2019 after serving most of a three-year sentence for the crime of attacking authority for criticizing Fidel Castro in an interview, told Radio Martí that the condition of being a political prisoner further aggravates the experience of the prison, as is happening with the peasant from Manatí.
“Imprisonment with common prisoners in prison is horrible and then, added to this, we would say what the political police add to people, political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, to make their stay even more difficult, their permanence in the prison, the harassment of the common criminal population that sometimes unfortunately lends itself to undue acts of violence, especially against political prisoners and everything else … The permanent harassment of the political police, the suspension of visits, the suspension from the phone calls, all possible contact with the outside world, with the family, which further aggravates and makes the stay in prison more painful, “declared the National Coordinator of the MCL.