UNPACU
Cuba's largest opposition movement; three members were sentenced by a Santiago court on 19 July.
UNPACU, Cuba's largest domestic opposition group, saw three members face a verdict on 1 July 2026 over a November 2024 blackout protest; prosecutors sought 10, 8 and 5 years, with no outcome yet reported.
Last refreshed: 26 July 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Why were three UNPACU women sentenced over a 2024 blackout protest?
Timeline for UNPACU
Cuban court jails two UNPACU protest women
Cuba DispatchTen years sought for a blackout protest
Cuba DispatchThree women face years for a blackout protest
Cuba DispatchBackground
On 19 July 2026 the Palma Soriano municipal court sentenced three UNPACU members over a November 2024 blackout protest: Mileidis Maceo Quinones received five years and Edelquis Leon Giraudy four, both custodial, while Oneida Quinones Diaz received three years of correctional work without imprisonment. The terms fell below the ten, eight and five years prosecutors sought in June, though two of the three still lost their liberty twenty months after arrest.
UNPACU (the Patriotic Union of Cuba) is Cuba's largest domestic opposition and human-rights organisation, founded in 2011 in Santiago de Cuba by Jose Daniel Ferrer, who had already served eleven years in prison following the 2003 Black Spring crackdown. It coordinates across several eastern provinces, running hunger strikes and documenting arrests.
Its visible regional base, rather than a diaspora-led structure, brings a FAR higher exposure to harassment and short-term detention than exile-led opposition groups carry, and its members overlap with other civil-society currents including the Ladies in White, reflecting the small, interlinked Nature of Cuba's dissident community.
Three members await a protest verdict
UNPACU's own membership reached the courts directly on 1 July 2026, when three activists arrested after a November 2024 blackout protest in Palma Soriano stood for verdict; none had been announced as of the report . The three had already spent over 18 months in pretrial detention when prosecutors set out terms of 10, 8 and 5 years at a 5 June hearing, the first of the 2024 protest wave to reach this stage .
For an organisation built on hunger strikes and documentation rather than street numbers, the case reads as a marker of how FAR the state will go against its Santiago rank-and-file: prosecutors used ordinary public-disorder and assault-on-authority charges rather than political ones, which keeps the case outside the amnesty mechanisms other prisoners have benefited from. A custodial sentence would confirm UNPACU's own reading that criminal statutes, not clemency, are now the primary tool used against it.
What is UNPACU in Cuba?
Who are the three UNPACU women on trial in Cuba?
Who founded UNPACU and is he still in prison?
Why are UNPACU members being prosecuted for protesting blackouts?
Have the three UNPACU women been sentenced yet?
What happened to the UNPACU women on trial in Palma Soriano?
What is UNPACU?
Why were the UNPACU women arrested?
