Military trials of civilians in Cuba

From this elToque report on Cuba's proposed military criminal code:

In Cuba it is common for civilians to be tried in Military Courts regardless of whether the conditions of the accused and the fact correspond to what is established in the military procedural law.

A recent example is sentence no. 13 of 2023 issued by the Central Territorial Military Court against eight people from Cienfuegos who protested during the summer of 2022 against the electricity cuts in the Covadonga town, Aguada de Pasajeros municipality. 

The ruling provided for sentences of up to nine years in prison for some defendants, after having considered that their protest constituted the common crimes of sabotage and public disorder, both typified in the current Penal Code. 

Following the protest, the authorities created two separate files. One was processed by the Civil Prosecutor's Office; in which they grouped the protesters who did not take part in the assault on a local currency collecting store (TRD). Another, instructed by the Military Prosecutor's Office, grouped those who did. 

However, as the investigations progressed, the General Prosecutor's Office decided that the demonstrators should be tried in a single file that had to be investigated by the Military Prosecutor's Office and tried by a Military Court. The legal justification for the decision was that the TRD belongs to Cimex (a company of the Armed Forces business system). Therefore, a social protest that had resulted in the assault of a facility of this type could be considered a crime that had been committed in a “military zone”. In this way, he had to be judged by the Army Courts.

The above is not a new treatment. Several protesters from 11J were tried in the military courts under the same argument. But it is a treatment that shows how crooked the Cuban justice system is and how deep is the deformation of a police/military State that considers a store of basic necessities a military zone, and a social protest that did not even have the store as a center, a criminal act that must be judged under the rules of a military court.

The trial of civilians by military courts is strongly disfavored under human rights jurisprudence. Military trials of civilians are a familiar feature of regimes that wish to suppress dissent.