Loreto Hernández García, a senior leader of the Association of Free Yorubas of Cuba, is in “critical health” after being imprisoned in the aftermath of the July 11 protests on the island, a report indicated on Thursday.
According to the Global Liberty Alliance (GLA), which defends the faithful from religious persecution around the world, Hernández is among at least five members of the Free Yorubas group imprisoned and facing dubious charges of “public disorder” for participating in the nationwide anti-communist protests on July 11. The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful but have resulted in an estimated thousands of arrests and state disappearances across the island.
Many of those arrested are members of vulnerable communities such as the faithful – both Christianity and santería adherents – the elderly, known political activists, and children.
Hernández is the vice president of the Free Yorubas. Wife Donaida Pérez Paseiro is the president of the group and is also believed to be in police custody since July 16.
The Free Yorubas are a group that practices santería, a syncretic Afro-Cuban religion that mixes elements of Spanish Catholicism with Nigerian paganism. The Communist Party of Cuba is a nominally atheist institution but allows some forms of religious worship if fully controlled and censored by government officials. The Free Yorubas group was founded in 2012 as an alternative to the state-controlled Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba.
“The Cuban government has accused this group [the Free Yorubas] of ‘destabilizing society’ and subjected its leaders to arbitrary detentions and beatings, destruction of ceremonial objects, police monitoring, and searches-and-seizures without probable cause,” the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has documented.
According to the GLA, Hernández has been in police custody since at least July 15 and believed to be in dire health conditions.
“Earlier this week, on August 2, Mr. Hernandez was urgently taken to see a doctor after complaining of chest pains and high blood pressure,” the GLA’s Thursday report detailed. “The doctor at the Caibarien facility told him he was experiencing pre-infarction and was in a critical state of health.”
The organization noted that Hernández “suffers from several pre-existing medical conditions including high blood pressure, chronic asthma, chronic hypertension, diabetes, and other cardiac problems” and that he is currently “at risk of lethal complications” given the poor state of sanitation in Cuban prisons, particularly in light of the government’s widely condemned handling of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
The GLA noted that the health and general wellbeing of Pérez, the Free Yorubas president and Hernández’s wife, under police custody remains “unknown,” as police officials have not allowed family to visit. GLA identified three other Free Yorubas in prison: Elizabeth Cintra García and twins Lisdiany and Lisdany Rodríguez Isak, all 20 years old.
Hernández and Pérez may be facing particularly extreme abuse in prison not just because of their status as religious leaders, but for being part of a larger community of longtime dissidents that the Communist Party has failed to dissuade from human rights advocacy. Hernández’s brother – Jorge Luis García Pérez, commonly known as Antúnez – is a former political prisoner and considered one of the longest-serving in the history of the Castro regime. Antúnez spent 17 years in prison, from 1990 to 2007, and almost immediately returned to anti-communist activism upon his release, resulting in several other arrests. Antúnez now resides in Miami, Florida, where he runs the National Front of the Civic Resistance, an anti-communist group.
“My brother is having serious cardiovascular issues. My brother has hypertension and diabetes and, yesterday, the hypertension crises were so severe that the doctor said he was pre-heart attack,” Antúnez said on Wednesday in an interview with the independent outlet ADN Cuba. “That is to say, my brother, with all these problems he has, is practically condemned to death.”
“In the case of my brother – and not because he is my brother – he has recognized publicly that he was one of the leaders of these protests in Placetas – protests that, not only were they peaceful, they were not anything but the clear exercise of the right of assembly,” Antúnez asserted. “We the family do not deny his participation … but we do hold the dictatorship responsible for what could happen with my brother’s life.”
The former prisoner of conscience acknowledged that he fears he will never see his brother again and that hundreds, if not thousands, of other dissidents are in similar circumstances for acts of peaceful dissent.
While the vast majority of the violence against protesters – including opening fire on unarmed crowds and bloody door-to-door police raids – occurred in the immediate aftermath of July 11, reports continue to surface of detentions and police brutality against suspected protesters or dissidents generally. Cuban independent outlets have reported continued home invasions by state security forces this week, often culminating in the disappearance of their target, their families left with little recourse.
The human rights group Cuban Prisoners Defenders estimated in a report this week that Cuban Communist Party agents have detained or disappeared “an impossible-to-determine number between 2,000 and 8,000 people.”
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