MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Cuban sentenced to two-year in jail for protesting about hunger

YouTube success condemned a sober and retracted Panfilo Gonzalez

A Cuban court of appeals in Havana on Friday upheld the two-year sentence handed down to a man who had drunkenly protested before television cameras about hunger in Cuba, according to Cuban dissidents.

The court ruled that Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, 48, committed the crime of being a “social danger,” according to what Richard Rossello – of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, who attended the hearing as an observer.

The sentence may not be appealed and Gonzalez, known as “Panfilo,” will spend his two years behind bars in the Toledo 2 prison, located on the outskirts of Havana.

The incident occurred in July, when an evidently intoxicated Panfilo interrupted the taping of a documentary on urban music in Cuba and shouted: “ There’s tremendous hunger here. What we need is ‘jama’ (a Cuban slang word for food).”

His outburst might have passed unnoticed if someone had not posted the images on YouTube, where more than 45,000 people viewed them, and from that point forward support groups began to spring up for Panfilo.

Upon seeing the commotion his remarks had caused, Panfilo retracted them in a later video in which he asserted: “I didn’t know who filmed me, and I didn’t do it with any aim” in mind, but that did not stop authorities from arresting him and putting him on trial on early August in a closed-door hearing.

”I don't want problems because I don't want to know anything about politics. Not there (the United States), or here,” he said.

On Thursday, his defence attorney emphasized before the appeals court that his client was suffering from alcoholism and therefore he asked that he be placed in an institution for rehabilitation, but his arguments did not find favour with the court.

At the hearing, which was closed to the press, two Western diplomats showed up but they were not allowed to meet with the accused and were forced to remain outside the courtroom because they did not have the express permission of the Cuban Foreign Ministry to be there.