The case of the young political prisoner, Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo, who was sanctioned for participating in the July 2011 demonstrations, being under-age, It exposes how Cuban authorities use the judicial system not to deliver justice, but as a mechanism for arbitrary and discretionary punishment. internment, His imprisonment, first in Valle Grande prison and currently in Prison 1580, after the revocation in January 2025 of his Correctional Labor without Confinement sentence, is not an isolated incident. It is the direct consequence of the Cuban authorities' arbitrary decision to prolong his imprisonment as political punishment.
- The disciplinary pretext: the trap of sanctions while at liberty
Following his arrest in July 2021, Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo was tried and sentenced by the State Security Crimes Chamber of the Havana Provincial People's Court to 14 years' imprisonment for sedition. In 2022, following an appeal, the same chamber, but of the Supreme People's Court, reduced his sentence to 5 years of Correctional Labor without Imprisonment. However, the design of these alternative sanctions In Cuba, it functions as a legal trap that fosters arbitrariness in the case of political prisoners.
The freedom of Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo depended The evaluation of highly subjective criteria, controlled by an enforcement judge, agents of the National Revolutionary Police, and the State Security Department, is based on vague and ambiguous legal formulas such as compliance with certain schedules or assessments of social conduct. Thus, given the repressive nature of any form of dissent or political demonstration in Cuba, arguing a supposed minor infraction, such as "going out at night," became in January 2025 the perfect mechanism to revoke Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo's legal status. Consequently, he was sent to prison without his case being reviewed by a court.
- The arbitrariness of the revocation
Any serious calculation of how long a person should remain in prison must begin with an unbreakable rule: all time served in pretrial detention must be subtracted from the final sentence imposed. Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo was arrested on July 16, 2021, and his appeal sentence was handed down in June 2022. This means he accumulated almost a full year of pretrial detention, which should have been deducted from his 5-year sentence. Therefore, he only had about 4 years of his alternative sentence remaining. If the review of the expiration of this alternative sentence began on July 21, 2022, his sentence should legally expire in July 2026.
- The consequences of the revocation
This is where the arbitrariness becomes doubly punitive. When the revocation was carried out in January 2025 under the political pretext of punishing the activism of Lázaro Noel Urgellés Fajardo's mother, Maylin Fajardo, He cannot opt for the early release he was entitled to, having served two-thirds of his sentence in freedom. Now he must remain in prison until September 2026, not because he committed a serious crime, but because the January 2025 revocation validated and increased his deprivation of liberty, which is arbitrary from the outset. The court indicated September 2026 as the date, but it is unclear why September and not July, as in the case of others who received the same sentence.
At the same time, his case demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the mechanisms for upholding the rule of law in Cuba. Neither the Attorney General's Office nor the judicial system has demanded the "restoration of violated rights" (Article 198); rather, in practice, we witness close coordination between the courts and State Security. Lázaro Noel Urgelles Fajardo will spend more time in prison, and this will demonstrate, once again, the arbitrariness of a criminal justice system used as a mechanism of punishment against those who protest against the Cuban regime.