Dainier Quintero Peña was arrested, beaten, and taken to the Melena del Sur unit in Mayabeque.

From Lancaster, Pennsylvania, United States- Lázaro Yuri Valle Roca and Eralidids Frometa

Dainier Quintero Peña was arrested, beaten, and taken to the Melena del Sur prison in Mayabeque on July 10 by a Political Police officer and five police officers. They falsely accused him of stealing beef bones; in reality, he was detained because he was the son of Mayelin Peña, a renowned human rights activist and former member of the Ladies in White opposition organization. We demand Dainier's immediate release! End the political persecution of Mayelin Peña and the regime's opponents!

False accusations to detain opponents

Police claim to have found cattle bones after a search of Dainier's home. He found them while walking along the side of the road. Behind him was another young man and an elderly man, who also found a piece of the bone on the road. Everything seems to indicate that a spider or horse-drawn cart had fallen off the bone. Dainier gave some bones to a supposed friend, but he didn't steal or kill the cattle. Mayelin Peña, Dainier's mother, vehemently denounces that her son is being tortured, threatened by the police, and arbitrarily detained in jail.

The police tell Dainier that they don't care if he dies without food because he's not their family. This is how Mayelin expressed it: "...These officers who detained him have requested preventive detention from the prosecutor's office, which attacks Dainier for my political stance and opposition to the dictatorship. They took my son out for two minutes so I could see him because I staged a tremendous protest at the police station. I saw that he was very pale, his face yellow, and limp, so he couldn't stand for long, and he's urinating blood; his kidneys are failing..." These statements by Mayelin were made to the alternative media outlet Delibera, a journalistic space for Cuban activists opposed to the dictatorship, which we reproduce in these pages.

Mayelin already suffered the aggression of the Díaz-Canel dictatorship when her mother, Matilde Bullain, fell ill at 62 and was denied all medication and medical care in the hospital, leading to her death. Mayelin states: "...The hospital director commented that he doesn't know why they didn't give her the medication since the hospital pharmacy had the medicines she needed. But they killed her—there's no other way to describe it—and all because of my political stance against the murderous Castro-Canel dictatorship..."

We demand the immediate release of Dainier, whom we believe is being detained for political reasons, as part of the persecution and harassment that activist Mayelin Peña has been suffering. We demand an end to the persecution of Mayelin, and all the activists who are fighting. We also continue to demand the release of the more than 1,000 Cuban political prisoners in the jails of the Castro-Canel dictatorship.

In the image, Mayelin Muñoz as a Ladies in White activist