Yosandri Mulet Almarales, one of the more than 1,110 political prisoners confirmed in communist Cuba, died on Monday after attempting to commit suicide last week, several Cuba-focused outlets reported.
Mulet Almarales, 38 at the time of his death, was sentenced in December 2022 to ten years in prison alongside seven other men on “sedition” charges for participating in the historic July 11, 2021, wave of anti-communist protests in Cuba. On that day, hundreds of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to demand an end to more than six decades of communist rule in their nation.
Mulet Almarales received his sentence for having participated in local protests that took place in La Güinera, an impoverished neighborhood located in the outlying Havana city of Arroyo Naranjo. Cuban prosecutors accused him at the time of “complying with the repeated exhortations disseminated through social networks that incited the people of Cuba to demonstrate, violently and simultaneously, in different locations and to disregard the authority of Cuban state institutions, with the purpose of altering the socialist order.”
In addition to his ten-year prison sentence, Mulet Almarales was reportedly enslaved by the Castro regime authorities.
Martí Noticias, a U.S.-based outlet focused on Cuba, reported on Monday that, according to family members’ testimonies, Mulet Almarales jumped on Friday from the Calabazar Bridge located near his residence in Havana before returning from a furlough to the penitentiary center where he carried out forced labor. He was transferred to the intensive care unit of the Julio Trigo Hospital in Havana, where he remained in critical condition for three days before dying from his injuries on Monday.
Idalmis Salazar González, the prisoner’s aunt by marriage, told Martí Noticias that Mulet Almarales’ father was accompanying him on his way back to the prison on Friday but got distracted and continued walking.
“When he went to look for him, he didn’t find him. So he turned to the house to see if he was here, but he wasn’t. Then he found out that he had gone home. Then he found out that a boy had jumped off the bridge and that it was him,” she said.
“But he already had in his mind to commit suicide. He didn’t want to be in jail. He was very upset, he left the snack and other things he had to take with him.”
Mulet Almarales’s relatives told Martí Noticias that he suffered from mental disorders and he had previously attempted to commit suicide on June 2022 in the Combinado del Este prison, where he was being held at the time. Combinado del Este is a notorious torture center for political dissidents.
The family explained that Castro regime judicial authorities refused to grant parole to Mulet Almarales following the June 2022 failed suicide attempt and instead ordered his transfer to the “less severe” Toledo forced labor camp in the Marianao municipality, where he was entitled to short stays at home.
Mulet Almarales’s parents, María Antonia Almarales and Roberto Mulet, presented a second request for a parole in recent months that the Cuban prosecutor’s office aso denied, as per criteria issued by the regime’s Institute of Legal Medicine of Havana.
“Legal Medicine said that he was fit to go to jail,” the prisoner’s aunt said.
Salazar González explained that a large number of Castro regime security agents were present in the Julio Trigo Hospital after Mulet Almarales was admitted and stated that “they were waiting for the parole order to arrive to report his death, but he was already dead.”
The Cuban Prison Documentation Center (CDPC), a non-governmental organization, warned last week that it has registered several cases of Cuban political prisoners who have expressed suicidal thoughts or have attempted to commit suicide throughout 2024 out of desperation from the lack of response from the Castro regime to their demands for justice and respect for their human rights.
CDPC denounced in a recent report that an unidentified 31-year-old prisoner committed suicide this year at the Nieves Morejón prison, in addition to 16 other documented suicide attempts and other instances of self-harm.
In April, 22-year-old Cuban citizen Fray Pascual Claro Valladares tried to commit suicide after a Castro regime court sentenced him to ten years in prison on “sedition” charges for having participated in a series of peaceful protests that took place in the town of Nuevitas in August 2022. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) granted precautionary measures to Claro Valladares on June 30 after it determined that “his rights to life, personal integrity, and health face a risk of irreparable harm in Cuba.”
Mayelín Rodríguez Prado, a 22-year-old woman, was sentenced this year to 15 years in prison for filming the peaceful Nuevitas protests and broadcasting the footage on social media. One of the videos showed Cuban police officers beating Cuban citizen José Armando Torrente and three 11-year-old girls, including Torrente’s daughter.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.