Prosecutors at the Municipal Court of Palma Soriano, in Santiago de Cuba province, concluded an oral hearing on Friday 5 June 2026 seeking up to ten years in prison for three women who protested the electricity blackouts of November 20241. Mileidis Maceo Quinones faces ten years on an "atentado" (assault-on-authority) charge; Edilkis Leon Giraudis faces eight and Oneida Quinones five, both for public disorder. All three belong to the opposition group UNPACU (Patriotic Union of Cuba), and two are former members of the Ladies in White, the Catholic dissident women's movement.
The defendants were arrested on 4 December 2024 and have spent more than 18 months in pretrial detention; sentencing is set for Wednesday 1 July. This is the first 2024-protest case to reach sentencing, and it shows the same judicial apparatus that rejected Otero Alcantara's early-release appeal now working through the earlier blackout unrest. The charges matter for the wider count: "atentado" and public-disorder convictions are precisely the crimes-against-authority categories that Cuba's amnesty decrees exclude, so a sentence here adds names the next pardon wave cannot remove.
The courtroom ties back to the cells. Oneida Quinones is held under house arrest with diabetes, hypertension and chronic asthma, the same medical fragility that turns a custodial term into a health emergency. Sentencing the three as charged would convert an 18-month pretrial limbo into prison terms running to the next decade, for protesting the loss of power that the island is still losing now. The gap between the requested terms and whatever the court hands down on 1 July is the first measurable test of how hard Havana intends to punish the 2024 protest cohort.
