Americans who need a reminder of why the U.S. constitution’s first amendment is so vital need only look to Communist Cuba to see what happens to citizens in countries that do not protect the right to free speech.
The nation’s Communist government has just sentenced a political dissident to more than two years in prison. His crime? Sharing anti-government memes with his own family.
52-year-old barber Barreiro Rouco lives in the city of Cienfeugos and is a member of a dissident group opposed to the Communist government called Cuba Citizens’ Movement for Reflection and Reconciliation. He was first arrested in June of 2023 and charged with crimes against Cuba and for having relationships with “counter-revolutionary” organizations.
According to Rouco’s nephew, Jam Pérez Aguiar, the Castro government tried to make up other crimes that his uncle was guilty of because the government had not succeeded in persuading courts of his guilt on other counts. Aguiar said his uncle had proven “his innocence to the point of exhaustion.” Still, he was kept in prison until December of 2023, then put under house arrest.
Rouco used the popular text messaging phone app WhatsApp and created a discussion group labeled “family.” In that discussion, he and his family members criticized the Castro government and particularly the president, Miguel Diaz-Canel. Government prosecutors tried him for sharing images and memes with “degrading epithets” directed at President Diaz-Canel, dictator Raul Castro (brother of the late dictator Communist revolutionary Fidel Castro), and at the deceased Fidel Castro himself.
On Monday September 16 the Castro court tried Rouco and found him guilty of taking “denigrating and offensive actions” that besmirched the reputation and “integrity of relevant figures of the Cuban Revolution.”
The president of the dissident group that Rouco was a member of said the government knew that Rouco’s WhatsApp group was private and accessible only to his family but it made no difference.
José Raúl Gallego, a Cuban journalist living in Mexico, said the case shows the extreme lengths the Castro regime will go to in order to deprive ordinary Cubans of basic human rights. “How extreme is the persecution, the abuses, the paranoia,” of the government, Gallego asked, that they would go this far to punish a man who merely had political discussions privately within his own family circle.
