Castor Álvarez Devesa, a Cuban Catholic priest, was barred from travelling to the United States for an episcopal ordination on Friday 10 July, and the Protestant pastors Alian López Rodríguez and Rolando Pérez Lora were separately detained or threatened within the same fortnight, according to a log published by the OCDH1.
The instrument in the priest's case is the regulación de salida, the administrative travel ban that keeps a named Cuban inside the country without a charge, a hearing or a court order. It requires no judicial finding and offers no route of appeal, which is what has made it the state's preferred handling for people it prefers not to prosecute. Turning it on a cleric flying to an ordination extends a tool built for dissidents to the Catholic hierarchy, which has generally maintained a working relationship with the government and a channel to it.
OCDH logged 1,949 repressive actions across the six months to July. Three incidents in a fortnight amount to a pattern only within that monitor's own tally, and no one else keeps a comparable one. Álvarez Devesa's case adds a category rather than a number.
