Activist threatened by state agent for exercising freedom of speech

On the night of May 14, Marisleidi Belet Navarro, of the Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU), was threatened by Francisco Navarro Pérez, a major in the National Revolutionary Police (PNR), because she had allegedly publicly said that those who were leading the country were human rights violators, because they were engaged in beating defenseless women for the simple fact of demanding the freedom of the Cuban people. The activist says that the official told her that he was not sending her to be arrested because he was not on duty at the time, but that he already knew her. The activist told the officer that he could arrest her whenever he wanted because she had not said anything that was not true, and that many activists around the country, including the Ladies in White, were being threatened, imprisoned and beaten. She went on to say that they were repressed for thinking and acting differently than those who were beating the country, but that this was what they called democracy, because in a democracy people are not imprisoned or detained for thinking and acting differently than those who govern, and this only happens in totalitarian regimes.