It punishes crimes on the internet and the external financing of certain activities: The new Cuban Penal Code, which must be approved by Parliament this Saturday, seeks to “protect” the socialist system at a time of strong tension after the historic protests of July 2021.
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As explained by its own authors, the Code “protects the socialist political and state system, from the set of actions and activities that are committed against the constitutional order and with the purpose of creating a climate of social instability and a state of ungovernability.”
As soon as it was published as a project on the website of the Attorney General’s Office in March, the text aroused rejection among the dissidents to the government.
“The new Penal Code is a new twist for the regime to intensify the repression against citizens,” René Gómez Manzano, president of the Corriente Agramontista, the oldest organization of Cuban opposition lawyers, told AFP.
This project is part of a series of lawssuch as food sovereignty, the code of families and personal data, intended to complement the new Constitution approved just in 2019. In the extraordinary meeting that Parliament will hold on Saturday, several of these bills will be presented to the plenary, including the Penal Code to be voted on by the deputies.
The project is committed to a ‘penal expansionism’
It is not the Penal Code that Cuba needs
The penal code typifies 37 new crimes related to “telecommunications, information and communication technologies”, explain the authors, a multidisciplinary team specially designated for its preparation.
This is a way to respond to the arrival of the mobile internet since the end of 2018, which has shaken Cuban civil society and generated other areas of possible crimes, including political ones.
This legislation also comes after the historic demonstrations of July 11 and 12 in Cubathe largest in 60 years, which left a balance of one dead, dozens of injured and more than 1,300 detainees, many of whom have been sentenced to sentences of up to 30 years.
“It is not the Penal Code that Cuba needs,” jurist Harold Bertot told AFPuntil recently an academic at the University of Havana, now in Madrid, researching.
“Chronologically, its discussion and eventual implementation coincide at a time of political and social tension in Cuba,” he estimates. The Code “commits to criminal expansionism, the hardening of penaltiesand (is) designed to have a notable impact on Cuban political activism,” he adds.
Criminalization of protests
In the text, to the crime of “public disorder” a figure is added that penalizes individual or group demonstrationswhile in acts “against the security of the State” another figure is inserted to punish the external financing of non-legal activities.
Opposition digital media outlets, activists and dissident groups are accused of being “mercenaries” for receiving funding from US agencies and NGOs, for which they could now be prosecuted with sentences of four to ten years in prison.
In a country where private media are illegal and journalists do not have the possibility of obtaining local financing, banning foreign funding is a death sentence for independent journalism“, reacted in February the Committee to protect journalists (CPJ).
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Thus, the current crime of “enemy propaganda” becomes “propaganda against the constitutional order”, while crimes against public order will include the “dissemination of false news or malicious predictions in order to cause alarm, discontent or disinformation”, the authors of the Code point out.
Bertot also considers that the law provides “a not insignificant number of crimes of the death penalty as a sanctioneven when its ‘exceptional’ character is recognized, goes in the opposite direction to criminal tendencies in the American continent itself that have opted for its abolition”.
In the first decades of the revolution, “el paredón”, capital punishment by firing squad, was frequently applied as a deterrent. Since 2000, however, a de facto moratorium was applied, which was only broken in April 2003, with the execution of three hijackers of a boat with 50 passengers in the bay of Havana, trying to emigrate.
AFP
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