Madrid/The Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Havana has definitively filed the complaint against the youtuber and Cuban activist Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente and her mother, Caridad Silvente, investigated for crimes of “acts against personal and family privacy, one’s own image and voice, identity of another person and their data.” The decision involves the lifting of the precautionary measures that weighed on both, such as the ban on travel between provinces and abroad.
The measure, although it is good news, has a negative side, since it represents a “way out” of the harassment to which the State Security is subjecting the young woman in recent weeks. “They really gave me three options,” said Ana Bensi – as she is known online. Let me be silent, reunite with my sister (and my mother), or regret that I spend my days of youth locked up in a penitentiary prison,” explained in a direct posted on Facebook.
The activist was summoned this Monday at the Alamar Police Station, where she was informed of the case file, but that was only the beginning of a long conversation that outraged the young woman. After signing the documents, they asked her to stay for a moment to chat and, then, “three people from counterintelligence who never identified themselves entered” and sat surrounding her, on both sides and facing her.
“Three counterintelligence people who never identified themselves entered” and sat surrounding her, on both sides and facing her.
The agents tried to convince her that they could help her in the music world. “‘Sofía, that dream is in your hands. It only depends on you, we can help you,’ they said, and with that they were trying to recruit me to keep quiet,” she says. Ana Bensi argues that these offers are not going to lead her to give up her ideas and contribute to “maintaining her circus while there is a people dying of hunger.”
“There they were, playing with my psychology. Making me believe that they were friendly and that they wanted to help me, because that’s how they work. Asking me how I felt about that whole situation, how what I’m going through made me feel, what I wanted, how I saw myself in the future…”, he continues.
The agents told her, she maintains, that no one was going to be able to help her in anything like they could and gave her names of activists and journalists in the United States and Spain – among them José Daniel Ferrer, Amelia Calzadilla or Mario J. Pentón – as an example of those who could not get her a visa. Furthermore, they insisted that she should not allow herself to be manipulated and threatened her that something might happen to her if she continued leading a cause against the regime.
“They said that it was better for us to keep quiet, that any little thing could happen to us, that I was too skinny and too young to be a leader. I don’t want to be a leader of anything, I simply put my criteria on social networks,” she stressed in several moments of the video, almost 22 minutes long.
These last three weeks have not been easy, according to the young woman, who affirms that the authorities have been cruel against everyone around her, not just against her.
These last three weeks have not been easy, according to the young woman, who affirms that the authorities have been cruel against everyone around her, not just against her.
At the beginning of March, Caridad Silvente, Ana Bensi’s mother, recorded and broadcast images of the agent who came to her house to deliver a summons to her daughter, whom they wanted to interrogate for spreading messages that denounce the situation in Cuba and attribute the hardships of the majority population to the regime. These types of activities, which do not go beyond criticism of a Government, are considered by the Cuban Penal Code “propaganda against the constitutional order” and penalized with long years of prison, with the dissemination being an aggravating factor. on-line.
The youtuber came weeks later to testify in relation to the accusation against her mother, but ended up being charged with the same crime. At the beginning of April, the US chargé d’affaires in Cuba, Mike Hammer went to their house, in Havana, on a backup visit. The pressure on his environment intensified just hours after the meeting and his sister, Elmis Rivero Silvente, was summoned to the Immigration Unit of the municipality of Playa under the pretext of an “interview for immigration control of stay.” Rivero is a US citizen and was spending a few days with her family on a trip that she took advantage of to bring medicine to her mother, but she became involved in the persecution of her family.
Despite the ordeal of recent days, the activist is clearer than ever: “All these injustices only demonstrate what they deny so much: a dictatorship. If you think they plan to silence me, they are very wrong, unless they put me in prison.”
