Saturday, August 3, 2024, 18:05
A cell phone crossed the gap between Cuba and Europe a few days ago, clandestinely. It contained proof of the innocence of a German citizen sentenced to 15 years in prison on the Caribbean island. Luis Frómeta recorded the protests of Cubans against the dictatorship, and the repression with gunshots and stones three years ago. There is even a very close-up of a paramilitary unsheathing and shooting. The previously unpublished images, dated July 12, 2021, show women and men walking and shouting, and then running in the opposite direction a few seconds into the video.
With his phone in his hand, Frómeta can be heard saying: “Police, don’t throw stones, please, don’t throw stones!” He is not the only one. Another voice warns that “there are children here.” It is 6:20 p.m. Perhaps emboldened by his dual nationality, this emigrant who left the island in the 1980s approaches the police: “Don’t throw stones yourselves, we are the example.” A paramilitary with a red shirt and a covered face passes by, takes out a gun and starts shooting in the direction of the fugitives. There are nine shots until the video cuts off at 2:29 minutes. “Hey, turn off my phone,” they order him. Those shots ended the life of a protester, according to human rights organizations.
Frómeta was arrested “for recording,” says a person close to him who prefers to remain anonymous because he lives in Cuba. “The next day they released him but kept his phone. Four days after he was released, on the morning of July 17, some people dressed in civilian clothes arrived and said they were from the DTI (Cuban Technical Investigations Department) and that Luis had to accompany them. They said he would return quickly and he never did.”
First they took him to a police station and finally locked him up in the State Security Center, known as 100 and Aldabó, “the most feared prison in Cuba.” “They didn’t let us see him or talk to him or even give him a lawyer,” says this source. The cell phone, however, was handed over to acquaintances on the island, who kept it safe for three years until the opportunity arose to extract it.
The recording, which implicates paramilitaries in the service of the regime in a murder and in the violation of the human rights of those who were peacefully demonstrating, was passed through customs thanks to the expertise of an unidentified traveller who handed it over to Frómeta’s family in Germany “a few weeks ago,” a source confirmed. “It was examined thoroughly and the video for which he was arrested was found, which proves his innocence. He did nothing violent.”
From Germany, the family shared the information with the Spanish-based organization Prisoners Defenders, which is conducting several international processes for the release of those still in prison for the riots known as 21J, which shook the Cuban regime.
Frómeta, the 61-year-old inconvenient witness, is now in a cell with 30 other inmates. He goes out in the sun for an hour a day and tries to keep fit with exercises. “He is in a torture prison,” warns Janie Frómeta, one of Luis’s daughters, from Germany, who was able to visit him twice, once in 2022 and again in 2023. “We write him letters regularly, but he doesn’t receive them. When I was allowed to visit him, he told me in tears about the terrible violence of the interrogations. For example, that he was already unconscious on the floor and they still continued to beat him.” In addition, at the end of last year “he was seriously injured by other inmates and spent a long time in the infirmary.”
Published on YouTube, the video of Frómeta was edited with that of another person, this one anonymous for security reasons, who recorded the moment of his arrest. He did not resist, despite the mistreatment and the blows. Silence fell around Frómeta and the other convicts. The international community too. Until now.
New pressure
This summer, the dissemination of her video was linked to a United Nations resolution that calls for the release of Frómeta and other citizens. In a document signed by three special rapporteurs (for the ‘Promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion’, the ‘Rights to freedom of peaceful assembly’ and ‘Torture and other cruel treatment or punishment’) and three working groups (on ‘Independence of judges’; ‘Arbitrary detention’ and ‘Enforced disappearances’) they conclude that the detention was “arbitrary”, based on “discriminatory reasons due to her political opinions” and that “no trial should have been held”. They warn that there was “incommunicado detention”, “interrogations under duress”, lack of “legal representation” and a “defense without access to evidence”.
The special rapporteurs believe that Frómeta and 16 other detainees, the first whose cases have been examined by the United Nations, should be “immediately released and granted the effective right to compensation and other forms of reparation.”
With the international spotlight on Frómeta, this man who left Cuba when he was 20 years old becomes a symbol of the 800 cases left by the repression of 21J. “I chose these 17 because we had full documentation of them,” explains Javier Larrondo, director of Prisoners Defenders, the organization that brought the case to the United Nations and that hopes to pursue others.
In its official response, the Cuban government said that these arrests were made for “violent demonstrations” and not for “political opinions or for exercising the rights of assembly and demonstration.”
Another European was arrested in the repression that year, a Cuban-Spanish resident in the United States, named Mario Prieto, who was released. Sentenced to 12 years in prison, he was granted an “extra-penal license” for health reasons in December 2022. “There was diplomatic mediation by Spain,” explains Larrondo. “But in the case of Frómeta, the German government believed the Cuban and his accusations… until the video came out. Now they are verifying his innocence. Along with the condemnation by the United Nations, they should make it a priority to get him out of prison.” The almost two-minute video could make the Cuban government reopen a chapter that it believed closed.
Waiting
The news of Luis Frómeta’s arrest reached Germany by telephone. “I received a call from my family,” recalls Janie Frómeta, who is supported by a “political sponsor” of the CDU, Lars Rohwer, and several human rights associations. “I knew that hell was about to begin for Dad and for us.”
Suffering from hypertension, thyroidism and a back injury, Frómeta receives medication from the German embassy, despite the fact that he has not been defended in court. “He remains firm, he knows that a great injustice is being committed and that many organizations are calling for his freedom and that of all political prisoners,” says someone on the island.
She has seen her German daughters three times in these years. “The first visit to prison was a nightmare,” recalls Janie Frómeta. “I had to undergo a body search. I had to strip completely naked and they searched everything. I had never felt so humiliated. We spent most of the time crying together. She told me about the violence and the bad circumstances she lives in.”
The meeting took place inside an air-conditioned room with a small leather couch, a glass table and a thick curtain on the wall “that covered a microphone,” Janie describes. Four guards were waiting for them. “I used to hold him in my arms all the time, side by side on the little leather couch.”
#video #hidden #years #prisoners #cell #phone #appeared #Cuban #dictatorship #Diario #Vasco