HAVANA, Cuba (LifeSiteNews)— A teenage girl was arrested, forced to strip, and sexually humiliated by police in service of Cuba’s communist regime.
Gabriela Zequeira Hernández, 17, was arrested in the municipality of San Miguel del Padrón in Havana during one of the many anti-communists protests that took place in Cuba on July 11. According to Breitbart, the girl was on her way home from the hairdresser and was merely caught up in the crowd.
According to the BBC, Gabriela’s mother said that the men who arrested her daughter are brutal Cuban special forces known as the Black Wasps.
“One took her arm, the other by the neck, they pulled her by the hair and put her inside the truck,” she said.
Gabriela was kept in a police station cell overnight, and then taken to the notorious 100 y Aldabó prison, where she was forced to undress.
“They took me to the dressing room and told me ‘Take your clothes off, take your shirt off,’” the girl recounted.
“They searched my bra looking for wires. I don’t know why they had to do that. I kept telling them I was a minor … and they didn’t listen.”
The ordeal worsened when she was told to remove more clothing.
“I took off my shorts and underwear, and there they told me to cough, to squat and squeeze the lower part of my torso,” Gabriela said.
“They told me to stick my finger inside me to see if I was carrying anything. I told them I was a minor; they couldn’t do that,” she continued.
“They told me, ‘You’re a minor for some things, but not others. Right now, you are of age.’”
While she was in prison, Gabriela was threatened with rape.
Originally sentenced to 8 months in prison, the girl was permitted to serve her time at home as house arrest after her plight met with international outrage.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio brought attention to the girl’s sufferings by posting her account on Twitter and stating, “The regime in #Cuba are a bunch of sadists. This is what they did to a 17-year-old girl.”
The regime in #Cuba are a bunch of sadists.
This is what they did to a 17 year old girl pic.twitter.com/ajSOVz1Fn6
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 28, 2021
In retaliation for the uprising, the communist police have been kidnapping boys as young as 14, dressing them in military gear, and forcing them to confront Cuban patriots. Reports of cutting ears and gouging eyeballs as a means of persuading boys to fight for the regime are surfacing from cell phone video recorded clandestinely and released to the USA by Cuban citizens.
The Castro regime put children in paramilitary units to confront protesters. Gross violations of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that Cuba ratified @UNHumanRights @POTUS @PressSec @JoeBiden action is needed #SOSCubaLibre #SOSCuba #PatriaYVida https://t.co/iTlBVZsbGO pic.twitter.com/Im3lX1D7ct
— Richard Tapia (@rtapia777) July 16, 2021
As many human rights violations come to light, international support for the people of Cuba is growing and the hashtag #SOSCuba is spreading through Twitter. Videos of Cubans shouting “Libertad!” have appeared on social media.
However, people and organizations sympathetic to the Marxist regime, including Black Lives Matter (BLM), blame the United States’ embargo for Cuba’s lack of basic resources. In 2016, BLM marked the death of late dictator Fidel Castro with the tweeted tribute “Rest in Power.”