Cuban singer Danay Suárez was acquitted by the People’s Provincial Court of Havana in a lawsuit filed against her last June by Cuban LGBTI activist Alberto Roque Guerra, according to the prosecution’s own publication on his Facebook profile.
The trial began with a message the young rapper shared on her Facebook profile about pedophilia and homosexuality and for which people from the LGBTI community in Cuba were being insulted.
Roque Guerra, of the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), shared the verdict of the case, according to which, “(…) the conduct of Defendant Danay Suárez does not include the crime of injury as envisaged and punished in Section 320.1 of the Criminal Code, for even if its content is ethically and morally inappropriate, such an act does not satisfy the legally required presuppositions from an objective and subjective point of view for its configuration ”.
According to the Court, neither the complainant (Roque Guerra) nor the witnesses, members of the LGBTI community who participated in the trial, said they had “felt specifically hurt in their individual honor”.
He also felt that the activist’s response was exaggerated. In this sense, he pointed out that he first “ posted a series of messages, in which, although it was usually projected openly against all forms of discrimination and in a tone of rejection of the disputed text, in some of those messages he used images expressing the belief. slander. Christian confessing Suárez Fernández and making clear allusions to the defendant in others that could be offensive. “
The verdict called into question the credibility of the witnesses because of the friendship with the plaintiff.
On the other hand, the Court did not make a decisive assessment of the criteria of the doctors who appeared at the hearing. The fact that the text shared by Danay Suárez was not his own was of greater importance.
“Although for the doctors … the equality found in the text examined could influence the affirmation of negative criteria, of rejection towards homosexual people, and thereby instigate discriminatory behaviors that linked homosexuality with a psychological condition, and contrary to the efforts of the international community and Cuba to develop a culture of respect and inclusivity towards people of different sexual orientations, it is no less true that the contradictory text statements from a perspective at no time lost their focus expressed by another person and not by the defendant who made it when he published it … “, the collected document.
In another post on his Facebook profile with his reflections on the lawsuit, Roque Guerra described it as “transcendental” that the Cuban legal system has accepted his claim, despite ultimately ruling against him.
After raising a number of questions, including “how are hate speech taken into account in the interpretation of Cuban laws?”, He announced that he will appeal to the Supreme Court.
“I am not sad or defeated nor disappointed. I am not surprised by the content of the sentence. I repeat: my activism, my honor, my ethics, my dignity, my irrepressible will are one thing. Supreme Court I will publish my reasoned judgments on the entire process, ‘he concluded.
The controversy started on June 13, when Danay Suárez shared on his Facebook page an elaborate comment signed by Dayis Arizmendi comparing homosexuality with pedophilia.
According to the Cuban artist, who has shown her fierce fighting spirit in the principles of the Evangelical Church in recent years, pedophiles are using the same arguments as homosexuals to defend their practices.
The singer’s comments provoked a majority rejection, even among her followers.
The message from Roque Guerra announcing the start of the lawsuit also provoked all kinds of reactions.
To the journalist Yaiset Rodríguez Fernández, as now before the Court, Roque’s reaction seemed exaggerated: “I don’t like some reports, I even find some foolish, ignorant, with bad taste, insulting, rude, indecent, cruel, malicious … “Ohhh, they insult me. And what should I do? Out of respect for the other person’s right to have a different opinion, it certainly won’t be to sue.”