"Cuban women activists and journalists, who are calling for a freer and fairer country, face a wall of 'repression, state violence, and authoritarian practices' that, according to human rights organizations, endangers their lives and seeks to silence their voices.
Amnesty International's regional researcher for the Caribbean, Johanna Cilano, has indicated there are signs that this ‘state gender-based violence’ to which women are subjected occurs ‘systematically,’ with the aim of ‘silencing all dissent.’
'The Cuban state uses arbitrary detentions, violence, and criminalization of protest against all those who raise their voices, but there is also state violence based on gender, a differentiated violence with a specific pattern,' Cilano said in an interview with Europa Press.
'This institutional violence against women activists, journalists, and teachers,' she continued, 'is used as a mechanism to pressure them into stopping their defense of human rights’ in a country where the government, subject to international sanctions, ‘continues to violate human rights and international standards within its own borders.' "
