(Havana) Cuba adopted on Sunday a new Penal Code aimed at “protecting” the socialist system by punishing demonstrations in particular, ten months after the unprecedented revolts of the summer of 2021.
Posted at 2:49 p.m.
This new code, approved during the day by parliament, “protects the interests of the state and the people”, declared the president of the Supreme Court, Rubén Remigio Ferro, presenting the bill.
“The most serious violations concerning the abusive exercise of constitutional rights, participation in subversive activities, as well as aggressions through information technologies are punished”, underlined Mr. Ferro.
The text punishes in particular political activities on the Internet, demonstrations and foreign financing of certain activities.
Barely published on the site of the general prosecutor’s office in March, the project had aroused rejection among the opposition to the communist government.
“The new Penal Code is a new turn of the regime’s screw to intensify repression against citizens,” said René Gomez Manzano, president of Corriente Agramontista, the oldest organization of Cuban dissident lawyers.
“It’s not the Penal Code that Cuba needs,” said jurist Harold Bertot, a professor at the University of Havana now in Madrid for research. And “chronologically, its discussion and then its entry into force coincide with a moment of political and social tension in Cuba”.
This code “Bets on greater criminalization of offenses, the strengthening of penalties”, he regrets. “It is designed to have a great impact on Cuban political activism.”
To the already existing offense of “public disorder”, is now added another penalizing individual or group demonstrations. It also punishes foreign financing of activities “against the security of the state”.
Independent or opposition media, activists and dissident groups will thus be considered “mercenaries” if they receive money from American agencies and NGOs, risking sentences of four to ten years in prison.
This text is part of a series of laws, such as those on food sovereignty, the Family Code and personal data, intended to complement the new Constitution approved in 2019.
It was adopted less than a year after the historic demonstrations of July 11 and 12, 2021, unprecedented in sixty years of revolution, which left one dead and dozens injured. More than 1,300 people were arrested, many of whom later received heavy sentences, up to 30 years in prison.