Cuba’s communist regime sentenced dissident José Manuel Barreiro Rouco to two and a half years in prison for having privately shared anti-regime memes with his family, Martí Noticias reported on Wednesday.
Barreiro Rouco is a 52-year-old barber who lives in the city of Cienfuegos and has been a member of Cuba’s Citizens’ Movement for Reflection and Conciliation (MCRR), a local dissident group, since 2010.
The Cuban dissident was initially arrested on June 15, 2023, in the Cienfuegos municipality of Aguada de Pasajeros. At the time, Castro regime officials charged him with crimes against the security of the state and relationships with alleged “counter-revolutionary” groups.
The dissident’s nephew, Jam Pérez Aguiar, explained in a Facebook post on Saturday that the Castro regime tried to fabricate other crimes the courts did not recognize after his uncle proved “his innocence to the point of exhaustion,” but he remained in prison for six months until December 30, when he was placed under house arrest.
Barreiro Rouco maintained a private WhatsApp group chat titled “Family” in which he and other relatives privately exchanged memes criticizing Castro regime officials, including the regime’s figurehead president, Miguel Díaz-Canel.
Martí Noticias explained that Barreiro Rouco was tried and sentenced on Monday by a Castro regime court that found him guilty of “carrying out denigrating and offensive actions that affect the honor and integrity of relevant figures of the Cuban Revolution,” including Díaz-Canel.
According to the regime prosecutors, Barreiro Rouco shared “images in which degrading epithets” were attributed to Díaz-Canel, nonagenarian communist dictator Raúl Castro, and his brother, late murderous dictator Fidel Castro, to the messaging group.
“That was a family WhatsApp, and they [police investigators] knew about it after they seized the phone. The memes are not public; the memes were exchanged between brothers, cousins, families, uncles,” MCRR president Juan Alberto De la Nuez told Martí Noticias.
“In the trial, they could not prove that the memes were public. It is an injustice,” he added.
Cuban journalist José Raúl Gallego, who resides in Mexico, told Martí Noticias that Barreiro Rouco’s case is an example of the extreme human rights violations that exist in Cuba.
“We are talking about a person who is being asked to serve two and a half years in prison for sharing images that alluded to leaders of the regime in a private group of his family of 11 people,” Gallego said.
“In other words, how extreme is the persecution, the abuses, the paranoia, that they can imprison a person for what he shares with his family in a closed environment that has no reach whatsoever?” he questioned.
Gallego, in a Facebook post, stressed that there is no need to go to Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, or “anywhere else to exemplify what it means to live in flagrant violation of the most basic human rights” and to show “the extremes to which dictatorships go.”
The Cuban journalist stated that Barreiro Rouco’s case is not an exception “but the norm that has been applied for 65 years.”
“Tens of thousands of people have been imprisoned, expelled, punished, beaten, and intimidated for a simple comment, a joke, or for saying out loud or in a half-voice what many people think,” he observed.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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