Cuba convicts dissident historian of ‘disobedience’

A respected Cuban academic said Tuesday she had been found guilty of “disobedience” and ordered under house arrest after carrying out a series of solo protests to demand respect for human rights.

“The trial is over,” historian Alina Barbara Lopez, 58, wrote on her Facebook account.

“I can only say that I was found guilty of the crime of disobedience and that I will appeal,” Lopez wrote.

The judge also sided with prosecutors and ordered that Lopez be fined and barred from leaving the country, she said.

“It was a day of much outrage. The court was surrounded by police, by patrol cars in all the surrounding streets,” she later told AFP.

In April, after an earlier detention, Lopez began a solitary campaign of protest, sitting on the 18th of every month in Liberty Park in the city of Matanzas, east of Havana.

She posted her demands on social media, and they included convoking a constituent assembly, freedom for political prisoners, and cessation of harassment of those exercising their freedom of expression.

Before Lopez’s trial, Amnesty International wrote on X, formerly Twitter, its concern at the efforts by Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel to “silence dissidents in Cuba.”

The trial came days after the visit of the European Union Special Representative for Human Rights, Eamon Gilmore, who addressed with authorities as a “dominant issue” the situation of political prisoners, who according to NGOs number more than 1,000 people.

Lopez said her conviction is “an incredible thing because it was a simple trial for disobedience of a peaceful person who does not belong to any political… or illegal organization.”

“I am just an intellectual with certain prestige who they treat as if I were the worst kind of criminal.” (BSS/AFP)