State Security, Cuba’s feared counterintelligence agency, arrested Ernesto Ricardo Medina in front of his three-year-old daughter. Agents knocked on the house’s front door at 6 a.m. It was Friday, February 6. At that same hour the power went out in Holguín, in the island’s east. Nothing unusual in a city used to blackouts. “Tico, it’s the police,” his wife, Doris Santiesteban, warned him after looking out the window. Medina went downstairs and opened the gate. “It’s only a search order,” he said after the operation’s commander showed him the document.
The police took everything they could. His cellphone, that of his wife, the laptops, the chargers, the tripod, the camera. They put handcuffs on Medina and put him in the patrol car. At no point did they produce an arrest warrant, his wife tells EL PAÍS.
“Where is the little room?” an officer demanded in a threatening tone. He was referring to the small room that prompted the police operation: the corner of the house where, since 2024, Tico and his friend Kamil Zayas had recorded videos criticizing the regime for more than 140,000 followers on social networks. What Medina did not know as they took him away was that his partner had just been detained at the same time.
On February 11, pretrial detention was ordered. Seven months later, the Prosecutor’s Office filed formal charges against both men for three crimes: propaganda against the constitutional order; defamation of institutions, organizations, heroes and martyrs; and instigation to commit crimes.
This newspaper has obtained the prosecutor’s request, the order opening the oral trial and the ruling that denied them the possibility of continuing the process while free. The court file presents the two friends as a threat to the state and seeks stiff prison terms: eight years for Medina and 10 for Zayas.
The indictment is dated September 15 and is signed by prosecutor Fernando Valentín Sera Planas. It accuses them of creating the digital project El4tico (El cuartico) “with the purpose of transmitting, through social networks, their ideological position and urging the rest of the population to adopt that way of thinking.”
Medina and Zayas, the document continues, produced “counterrevolutionary content [...] they urged people not to accept the social and political order enshrined in the Constitution, [...] they insulted the country’s top leaders, the Government and political organizations such as the Communist Party.”
The prosecutor, who flaunts his support for the regime on social media, gained notoriety in Holguín province for seeking sentences of up to 30 years for young people who took part in the historic July 11, 2021 protests.
The arrest of the two friends completed a crackdown the political police had been tightening for months. According to Paula Lobón, a friend of Zayas living in the United States, the influencer’s family already suspected the repressive apparatus was preparing to move. “A person who is friends with the family and who works for State Security had warned them that there was an open case,” she says by phone.
El4tico’s appeal lay in its freshness: short, light-hearted videos in monologue format that unpacked the island’s crisis and questioned the regime. The account became a media trench built in that modest room, with peeling walls, furnished with a desk, a whiteboard and an old Russian fan.
The prosecutor’s request goes further. The document claims that the equipment the two friends used to set up the project was acquired because “they were linked to counterrevolutionary elements based in Spain.” Zayas and Medina, 34 and 32 respectively, allegedly received “funding and donations [...] from abroad [...] ranging from five to 200 dollars.”
The prosecutor identifies their alleged sponsors by full name: playwright Yunior García, activist Carolina Barrero, and Amelia Calzadilla, leader of the outlawed Cuban Orthodox Liberal Party. Immediately afterwards, however, the lawyer admits that he has not been able to “identify the donors.” In fact, according to the indictment, the old Russian fan so characteristic of the room was obtained through financing from Spain.
For Cuban lawyer Alain Espinosa, of the organization Cubalex (based in the United States), alleging a foreign connection without any documentary proof is no mere coincidence. “It’s a deterrent. They’re trying, in a way, to use foreign funding to criminalize dissent, because it’s a way to make life more precarious for all activists,” he argues.
The expert also says the charge of propaganda against the constitutional order is a “very expansive interpretation of the offense with the aim, basically, of being able to indict or punish them more severely.”
The prosecutor proposes as the main evidence at trial a couple of DVDs with fragments of the videos uploaded by the influencers and the testimonies of a municipal official, a neighbor, and a State Security captain. In Cuba it is common to use members of the state apparatus as key witnesses in trials against activists and dissidents.
For Espinosa, judges will only need to verify that Medina and Zayas said in any of their videos that it is necessary to bury the Cuban socialist model for a conviction of propaganda against the constitutional order to proceed.
Among the evidence presented by the prosecutor is a fragment in which, according to Sera Planas, the young men “urged the population, members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and the Ministry of the Interior to seize power to change the constitutional order, the form of government, and the socialist State.”
During a blackout, Doris Santiesteban sends a voice note to EL PAÍS. She speaks of the sadness at home without her husband. But she also speaks of hope. “Seeing the crimes they have charged him with… yes, those are many years. I hope something miraculous happens. I have a lot of faith. I have faith that it won’t be such a heavy sentence,” she says as her little girl is heard in the background asking about her father.
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