Havana court convicts Christian content creator who calls Cuba a 'dictatorship'

Nora Gámez Torres, Miami Herald on Oct 1, 2026

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A Cuban court sentenced a 21-year-old Christian content creator and her mother on Thursday to two years of “restriction of liberty” for filming a police officer in a case she and her supporters have denounced as retaliation for her vocal opposition to the communist government.

Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known on social media as Anna Bensi, and her mother, Caridad Silvente, went on trial Thursday morning at the Municipal People’s Court in East Havana. They were charged with “acts against personal and family privacy” for filming and posting online a plainclothes police officer who delivered a state security summons to Silvente at her home in March. Two weeks later, he pressed charges against Silvente. Her daughter was charged later.

The case was reopened in July, after state security officials interrogated Benítez for 11 hours. Mother and daughter had been under house arrest since March.

Speaking after the trial in the afternoon to foreign correspondents, independent journalists and religious and human-rights activists gathered near the court in Cojímar, she said she believed the trial was “a circus” and “an injustice.”

She said the judge announced the sentence orally, but they would need to wait for the written document to know the details. Under Cuban law, a restriction of liberty (”limitación de libertad,” not to be confused with house arrest) is a penalty served outside prison but keeps the person under judicial control. For example, the person cannot change residence or travel to another municipality or province without authorization and must appear before the court when summoned.

“Anna Bensi and her mother are being targeted by the Cuban Communist Party for their efforts to peacefully exercise their fundamental right to freedom of expression,” said Anna Lee Stangl, director of advocacy at Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human rights organization specializing in freedom of belief.

“It is ridiculous,” she added, “to suggest that these two women should spend two years in prison because a State Security officer, who is part of an institution that has terrorized its own people for decades, claims he felt unsafe after he was recorded carrying out an act of government intimidation.”

Images and videos shared on social media show police presence around the court. Speaking before the trial, Bensi said there were police deployed around her house. Cuban independent journalists Yoani Sanchez and Camila Acosta said the police prevented them from leaving their homes to cover the trial.

One video shows the moment police officers detained and handcuffed evangelical pastor Rolando Pérez Lora, who runs the “Herald of Christ” account on social media, while on his way to the court to accompany Benitez and her mother. He is heard loudly asking why he was arrested but the officers refused to say and pinned him to the ground.

Bensi has become a viral sensation with online postings about her life in Cuba and the lack of freedoms on the island. Before entering the court, she said she believed she would not get a fair trial.

“I feel powerless; none of us are criminals,” she said, referring to a community of religious content creators who have defied the communist government. “We are simply expressing what we think through a screen—using a phone, not a weapon. We do not agree with our country’s political system; that is not a crime.”

She denounced the arrest of Pérez, the pastor, saying he was detained with no justification “because Cuba is a dictatorship where you cannot think differently.”

When asked what the solution was, she said: “For Cuba to be free.”

In an unusual gesture in a country where churches need Communist Party authorization, four of the largest registered Protestant denominations in Cuba — the Assemblies of God, the Baptist Convention of Western Cuba, the Evangelical League of Cuba and the Methodist Church — published separate sharp statements expressing solidarity with Benitez and her mother.

“On an island that is falling apart, characterized by hunger, illness, unhealthiness, by scarcity of water, electricity and medicine, apathy and a lack of protection from the police, the imprisonment of these two innocent and righteous women will be the drop that causes the cup to overflow,” the Baptist Convention of Western Cuba said.

The case had been closely followed in Florida, where Cuban American Republicans weighed in Thursday.

“Once again, the criminal regime in Havana confirms its status as a repressor and violator of human rights... all for exercising their freedom of expression and denouncing the brutal repression,” Miami U.S. Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart said. “The United States reiterates that it will not tolerate these acts of repression by a decaying, corrupt and abusive dictatorship.”