Aniette Gonzalez became famous when she took several photos covered by the Cuban flag last year.
In one of those photos, Aniette appears with her face tilted to the right, looking up slightly. In another he appears in the same position, but facing to the left. And in the most significant photo, she appears sitting on the floor, with her legs crossed, her elbows resting on her knees and her hands holding the red triangle that covers her head.
What did Aniette Gonzalez want to tell us? Does looking up represent a question to God, something like, how long, Lord? Is the face hidden by the triangle and the star a silent shriek, a gesture of impotence that in the midst of pain cries out for the telluric force of the blood of our martyrs for independence?
Aniette appears serene. In those photos that have cost this young, beautiful woman jail, there is no malice or attempt to outrage our national flag. She is imprisoned, quite simply, because she is not a communist and dared to protest.
Because on multiple occasions we have seen Mr. Miguel Díaz Canel and other Cuban leaders use the flag on sweaters and caps. And I still remember something that is the greatest affront that has ever been done to our flag, I refer to the face of Che Guevara inserted into it by the Union of Young Communists. That was an outrage, but they did it, who are above the law.
Mr. Tekashi walked through the streets of Cuba wrapped in a Cuban flag and no policeman dared to stop him. Aniette was not as lucky as the foreigner, she was arrested and sent to prison a few hours after those photos were taken. It was not taken into account that she is a woman, a mother and, moreover, a person of good social conduct. This in a country whose criminal procedure law ensures that pre-trial detention is an exceptional precautionary measure.
Aniette waited more than six months in prison for the trial, which took place last October. The prosecutor insisted on trying to prove that Aniette was naked, as if this were an essential element to consider the crime of “Insult to national symbols”, provided for in article 269 of the Penal Code.
This article is yet another example of the total absence of legal technique in Cuban laws to define a punishable act, something that is intentional, since it seeks to attribute a very wide margin of accusatory possibilities to the dictatorship.
“Article 269.- Whoever sullies or, with other acts, shows contempt for the Flag of the Lone Star, the Anthem of Bayamo or the Coat of Arms of the Royal Palm, incurs a penalty of imprisonment of two to five years or a fine of five hundred to one thousand installments, or both.”
According to the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, the verb “mancillar” means to stain, dishonor, dishonor, baldonar, infamate, affront, macular or outrage. In a general sense, they are actions aimed at lowering the good reputation of the symbol, doing something that signifies, in a marked and unequivocal way, an affront to it. But it is evident that none of that can be perceived in the photos that Aniette took of herself. In those photos I think I see a woman who, when she puts on the flag, cries out for protection of her nakedness, a nudity that transcends the limits of her body in the performance and points to the lack of rights that a large part of our people suffer today.
What was so “dangerous” about this performance that Aniette González was sentenced to three years in prison?
The trial took place on October 4 and on that day the People’s Municipal Court of Camagüey should have issued the sentence, but it did not do so until February 1 because the dictatorship and its institutions can violate the law.
When I practiced law in Guantánamo, I learned the story of a woman from that city who, as a young woman, in the 1950s, went out into the streets covered by the Cuban flag, without any clothes underneath, to protest against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The police stopped her, put her in a patrol car, and drove her home, where she was handed over to her parents. There he asked her not to do it again. Batista’s was a cruel dictatorship, Castro’s has been much more so. The difference is that the Castros have enjoyed the complicity, silence or support of much of the world.
That is why today in Cuba there are more than a thousand political prisoners and the country has the second highest prison rate in the world, only surpassed by El Salvador. That is why these hypocritical governments vote in favor of the dictatorship at the UN and support it for a seat on the Human Rights Council.
Among those thousands of political prisoners and just for covering her body with the flag of the star that illuminates and kills, is Aniette Gonzalez, who today is better known among Cubans as “the woman with the flag,” who serenely threw it on herself as if she were also doing so with all the sufferings of the homeland.
Roberto de Jesús Quiñones Haces
Harrisonburg, VA, Tuesday, February 6, 2024
