Cuba’s communist regime is planning to force political prisoner Lisdany Rodríguez Isaac, who is reportedly currently seven weeks pregnant, to kill her unborn child, the human rights organization Prisoners Defenders denounced on Tuesday evening.
Rodríguez Isaac is a 25-year-old Cuban citizen currently serving an eight-year prison sentence at the Guamajal Prison in Santa Clara for having participated in the historic July 2021 wave of anti-communist protests. The Castro regime charged her with public disorder, “disobedience,” and assault for her peaceful display calling for an end to over six decades of communist rule in Cuba.
Rodríguez Isaac is a practitioner of a uniquely Cuban syncretic religion known as santería, Lucumí, or the Yoruba religion. She is one of three triplets. One of her two other sisters, Lisdiany Rodríguez Isaac, is also a political prisoner. The imprisoned siblings are members of the Free Yorubas, an independent group of santería practitioners that exists as an alternative to the regime-controlled Yoruba Cultural Association of Cuba.
Prisoners Defenders, a Spain-based human rights NGO, denounced the situation of the pregnant political prisoner, sharing a video published on social media.
The video shows an audio recording of Rodríguez Isaac’s mother, Barbarita Isaac Rojas, in which she states that she received a call from her daughter Lisdiany, who informed her that Lisdany is almost seven weeks pregnant. The mother denounced the Castro regime for not providing her imprisoned daughter with food or medicine and threatening her with a forced abortion.
URGENT! #Cuban regime forces Prisoner of Conscience Lisdany Rodríguez Isaac to have an abortion against her will
She is serving a 8year sentence for demonstrating on #11J and being Yoruba in #Cuba@UNHumanRights has defended her cause: AL CUB 4/2023
HELP US SAVE HER CHILD’S LIFE! pic.twitter.com/8xT8itrSMj— Prisoners Defenders (@PrisonersDFNdrs) January 23, 2024
“Lisdiany called me because Lisdany is pregnant. Her [Lisdany’s] husband is also in prison but she has been with him for many years and had never been able to get pregnant. Coincidentally, she is pregnant now. And well, she is six weeks, almost seven,” the mother is heard saying. ”They are not giving her good food there because in reality there is no food there, there is no medicine, there is nothing.”
“Now State Security wants to force her to remove [abort] the baby. And then she told me that she was going to see if I would report this because she doesn’t want to take the child out,” she continues. “She feels very bad. There is no Gravinol for dizziness, they don’t have any medicine in there to give you.”
Barbarita Isaac Rojas confirmed her daughter’s current precarious situation to the Argentine news outlet Infobae on Thursday, noting that her daughter’s husband is also a political prisoner.
“They want my daughter to have an abortion but she doesn’t want to because she has always hoped to have a baby,” Isaac Rojas said. “I didn’t imagine the moment it happened but they [her daughter and her husband] want to have it.”
“The situation there is terrible because there is no food or medicine. She feels bad and there is not even anything to eat,” she continued. “I want you to help and support her.”
Prisoners Defenders’ president, Javier Larrondo, provided Infobae with the following statement:
State Security is forcing prisoner of conscience Lisdany Rodriguez Isaac to have an abortion against her will. Lisdany, a member of the Free Yorubas of Cuba, is serving an eight-year sentence in the Guamajal women’s prison in Santa Clara for peacefully demonstrating on July 11, 2021 and for being a parishioner of the Free Yorubas of Cuba association.
He continued:
Lisdany and her husband, after years of waiting to have a child, had a meeting in the ward and, to their surprise, she became pregnant with a much-desired child. She is almost seven weeks pregnant. State Security officers at Guamajal prison want to force her to have an abortion, she does not receive any medical attention, they keep her without food or medicine and they coerce her to abort this baby that the couple wanted.
“A forced abortion against a mother’s will and for no clinical reason is nothing short of murder as a product of state terrorism,” Larrondo concluded.
The United Nations denounced the persecution of religious communities under the Castro Regime using a report published by Prisoners Defenders in 2022 as a basis.
The report contains 56 written statements from religious leaders of Cuba’s four most popular religions: santería, Catholicism, Evangelical Christianity, and Islam. The statements detail how the communist Castro regime “represses and controls in an absolutist manner” religious practices in Cuba, creating fictitious groups in the hands of the Communist Party through the Office of Attention to Religious Affairs (OAAR). The Rodríguez Isaac siblings’ case is one of the examples of religious persecution listed in the report.
As of December, Prisoner Defenders has registered 1,062 political prisoners in Cuba.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.