Punishing crimes on the Internet and external financing of certain activities: The new Cuban Penal Code must be approved by Parliament this Saturday.

As its authors explain, the Law “protects the socialist political and state system from a series of acts and activities committed against the constitutional order and with the aim of creating a situation of social instability and unmanageability”.

“The new Penal Code is a new twist for the regime to intensify its crackdown on citizens,” René Gómez Manzano, head of Cuba’s oldest opposition lawyers’ organization Corriente Agramonista, told AFP.

This project is part of a series of laws, such as food sovereignty, family law and personal data, which aim to complement the new Constitution approved in 2019.

‘Cuba doesn’t need code’

The Criminal Code symbolizes 37 new crimes related to “telecommunications, information and communication technologies”, the authors of which explain a specially designated multidisciplinary team for their preparation.

This is a way to respond to the arrival of mobile internet at the end of 2018, which has shaken civil society and created other possible areas of crime, including political ones.

The law also follows the historic demonstrations in Cuba on July 11 and 12, the largest in 60 years, in which one dead, dozens injured, and more than 1,300 people were detained and many sentenced to death.

“Cuba doesn’t need this Penal Code,” legal expert Harold Bertot told AFP.

The law “commits criminal expansionism with harsher penalties and is designed to have a significant impact on Cuban political activism,” he adds.

‘Mercenaries’

In the text, one figure is added to the crime of “disturbing public order”, which punishes individual or collective manifestations, while in actions “against the security of the state” another figure is added to punish the external financing of unregulated activities.

Opposition digital media outlets, activists and opposition groups have been accused of being “mercenaries” for receiving funding from US agencies and NGOs, and could now face four to ten years in prison.

“In a country where private media is illegal and journalists cannot obtain local funding, banning foreign funding is a death sentence for independent journalism,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in February.

Thus, he underlines that the current crime of “enemy propaganda” would be “propaganda against the constitutional order”, while crimes against public order would be “the spreading of false news or malicious predictions for the purpose of alarm, discontent or misinformation”. The authors of the code.

Bertot also considers that the law, even if its “extraordinary” nature is recognized, provides for an insignificant number of crimes with the death penalty as a sanction, contrary to the trends in crime policy in the Americas itself, and this trend favors crime policy. its removal”.

During the first decades of the Cuban revolution, “el paredón”, the death penalty by firing squad, was often used as a deterrent.

Since 2000, however, it has been the subject of a moratorium, but interrupted in April 2003 by the execution of three hijackers of a boat with 50 migrants in Havana Bay.