“Now that the Huber Matos branch has been created in the town of El Cristo, I truly got to know the face of repression in its strongest and most vile face. The arrests began, the assaults began, the fines began. We met every Thursday in our cell. And then came the repression. Every time we met, they took us to the El Cristo police, they beat us, threatened us, fined us, and this continued for so long that my family began to suffer with the house searches. Once when they raid my house, they took the food, all the food I had, even from the refrigerator. They took all my equipment like my cell phone, flash memory, laptop, all those things were taken away. My little girl suffered from nerves and fear…”
“My job as a worker, as a professional, in the Combined Sports Center in the town of El Cristo, I worked in all kinds of programs that are inserted within the community education center. I worked with the elderly, I worked with pregnant women, I worked with children, I worked with infants, I worked in sports training, I worked in gymnastics, in athletic preparation and physical culture. Because of my specialty as a sports specialist as such, these positive performance tasks led me to be an exemplary young man. An exemplary young man in such a way that, without asking me or worrying about my opinion or my political inclination, they proposed me as a Communist Youth militant, for being an exemplary young man. All the exemplary young people who did a good job, who dedicated themselves to their work, automatically belonged to the Youth. When they propose to me to be a Youth militant, I flatly refuse, because I told the managers that my goal was to work to be an athlete and prepare athletes to reach high performance.”
Abel Peña Carcajal was born in 1970 and grew up in the Guantánamo province, Cuba. He attended junior high school in the countryside collecting coffee and grass, among other things. Since he was little he had an inclination towards sports, so at about 13 years of age he was accepted at the Sports Initiation School, within which he participated in sports competitions even at provincial levels and especially in the branch of wrestling. He later attended the Provincial School of Physical Education and later concluded the Master‘s Degree in Sports Science. His opposition orientation is due to the wisdom of his grandmother who warned him against communism. Therefore, when thanks to his excellent performance as an athlete he was chosen to be a Communist Youth militant, he rejected it. He approached the opposition group of the Frank País November 30 Democratic Party, whose affiliate Abel founded in the town of El Cristo, Santiago de Cuba, where he lives to this day. He signed the Varela Project, and little by little, he leaned towards the Patriotic Union of Cuba, since he considered it more interactive with the people, and he founded its branch in El Cristo de la UNPACU under the name of Huber Matos, in his own home. After a hunger strike in February 2019 against the Constitutional reform, and later another hunger strike in March 2021, the repression against Abel and his family escalated to such an extent that his wife Yanin was forced to emigrate. Abel continues to live in El Cristo and continues to be an opponent of UNPACU.
