RECENT CRIMES OF THE CASTRO REGIME

These Remarks Were Given Before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations:

DISSIDENT: My name is Sirley Ávila León. I am Cuban and I live in Cuba. Because of my work as a delegate to the Municipal Assembly of People’s Power for the Majibacoa municipality since 2005, I have seen the double standards of our leaders, who in reality are not interested in the people. The biggest problems were bureaucratic: there was so much corruption that the system did not work. From the beginning, I started to take interest in the lives of the citizens and in particular the children of my region, who walked more than 9 kilometers through difficult roads in order to attend the nearest school. The parents, needing to accompany their children, had no time to cultivate their land, despite the abject poverty in which they lived. Some emigrated to other villages in order to spare their children. I set myself to the task of demanding the school that the neighborhood needed so much. I reached the highest echelons of power in Cuba, passing through all the intermediate levels, and although I managed to get a school built, it was soon closed, leaving the village and rural children in the same situation of helplessness.

Because of my work and my demands in favor of reopening the school, I began to be accused of being a leader, and the families of the farmers in my area began to receive threats that their school-aged children would be taken away from them. I was threatened and repeatedly repressed by government officials, and in Havana I was even expelled from the Council of State and threatened with being accused of threatening State Security. All this is what led me, on September 8, 2012, to denounce the regime’s human rights violations against the farmers and the people in general from the island itself, by means of the broadcaster Radio Martí. From that moment onwards, I was a victim of several attempts on my life, attempts to eliminate me physically, and other acts of vandalism against my farm, my animals and my property, all organized by the regime and its political police as part of its attempt to get rid of me. A young woman, Yudisleidy López Rodríguez, alerted me to the fact that the political police had offered highly dangerous common criminals rewards for murdering me. She was killed on September 26, 2014 for publicly decrying an attack on me in which my bed was set on fire during the early morning. Her murder was covered up as a crime of passion.  MORE