As Cuba rebuffs U.S. demands to release political prisoners, the island’s authorities continue arresting people who criticize or protest against the government, more recently targeting Christian evangelicals, including a 16-year-old boy in jail since last month.

Jonathan Muir Burgos and his father, Elier Muir Ávila, an evangelical pastor, were arrested on March 16 in Morón, a city in Ciego de Ávila province. The father was released, but the boy had been detained and sent to the maximum security Canaleta prison in the same province, accused of joining an anti-government protest in Morón three days earlier. At least one person was shot by authorities during the demonstration, in which some protesters broke into the Communist Party local building and burnt equipment and furniture in a street bonfire.

The teenager has been charged with sabotage, a crime punishable with a minimum seven-year sentence and has been denied a habeas corpus petition. Another 16-year-old boy, Cristian Crespo Álvarez, was also detained for participating in the Morón protest and faces similar charges, according to Cubalex, a non-governmental human-rights organization that has documented both cases. Prisoners Defenders, another non-profit based in Spain, also reported the arrests of 15-year-old Kevin Samuel Echevarría Rodríguez and 17-year-old Yoasnel Estrada Rodríguez.

Muir Burgos plays the piano at his father’s illegal church. He has dyshidrosis, a skin condition that causes blisters, and contracted bacterial infections in the past that weakened his immune system, his father said. He was about to start a new treatment to improve his medical conditions, and his father worries that every day in prison could put him in more danger.

“We need the truth to be known about what is happening with the Cuban regime here and with our son,” Muir Ávila told the Miami Herald in a phone interview. “They want to fabricate false accusations against him to incriminate him for many years. My boy is sick; my boy should not spend one minute more in that place.”

His family didn't know his whereabouts for several days following his arrest. On April 1st, Muir Burgos was moved to Canaleta, an adult prison, where a violent riot broke out in February, driven by food shortages, lack of medical care and abuse. Cuba’s penal code sets the minimum legal age of criminal responsibility at 16.

In a phone call with his parents, Muir Burgos told them he could not sleep because of the bedbugs and hunger, his father said in a video published by Prisoners Defenders.

“His diet is inadequate—truly terrible—and he cannot get to sleep because of hunger. By 4 p.m. he has already been given his little meal, and he consumes nothing else until the next day. He eats absolutely nothing else,” Muir Burgos said, adding that he was granted a family visit Monday to see his son in prison.

“Today he was going to eat, though, because we brought him lots of treats—naturally,” he added. “And why treats? Because he is a child, of course—a child currently making the transition from childhood into adolescence.”

Earlier this month, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, asked the Cuban Foreign Ministry to provide information about Muir Burgos. Last Friday, it granted him “precautionary measures,” an emergency order requiring a state to protect a person’s life, because it concluded that he is “in a situation of gravity and urgency, given that his rights to life, personal integrity, and health are at risk of irreparable harm.”

Cuba was suspended from the Organization of American States, but it was never formally expelled. Still, it has a history of disregarding those rulings.

“Why won’t the government respond favorably [to the Commission’s request] on behalf of our son—who really is sick, and who is in danger?” his father asked. “Do they want him to die in prison?”

A broader pattern

As protests in Cuba have become more common amid a severe economic crisis, Cuban authorities usually arrest a few demonstrators afterward to make an example, said Mario Félix Lleonart Barroso, a Baptist pastor that fled Cuba because of state repression and is deputy director at the Miami-based Observatory for Religious Freedom at Defensa CD, a non-government group monitoring human rights in Cuba. But it was Jonathan’s father’s long history of harassment by authorities that made him a target in what appears to be a larger pattern of crackdown on religious freedoms and free expression, he added.

“He is an evangelical pastor who has suffered greatly in Cuba,” said Lleonart, recounting how Caridad Diego, the top Communist Party official handling religious affairs, pressured his former congregation’s leader to expel him for commenting on Cuba’s current crises while preaching. Muir built his own religious community, but without a legal cover, government harassment increased.

Lleonart said he has seen a similar pattern of stripping vocal religious leaders of government authorization, followed by imprisonment. In Muir’s case, he said retaliation came in the form of his son’s arrest.

“Cuban authorities probably say, ‘We have to keep a handful of the teenagers to make an example of them for the other boys, so they won’t dare to follow suit.’ But of course, the pastor’s son is the priority,” said Lleonart.

Lleonart believes Muir might have angered Cuban authorities even more after meeting the head of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, Mike Hammer, during a visit to Morón in January. Hammer has called on the Cuban government to release Muir Burgos and all political prisoners on the island.

A senior State Department delegation visited Havana earlier this month and pressed Cuban authorities to release political prisoners. But the country’s leader, Miguel Díaz-Canel, has denied Cuba has political prisoners and has stressed that his government is not negotiating any internal political matters with the United States.

Crackdown on young Christian influencers

Cuba has long been criticized for restricting freedom of religion, and the government prohibits religious practice if churches are not authorized by the state. In its latest annual report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended redesignating Cuba as a “country of particular concern…for engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.” The organization also added Muir Burgos to its list of victims of violations of freedom of religion or belief.

Young Christians who have become influential political voices through social media have also become the latest target for Cuba’s feared state security agency.

Anna Sofia Benitez, known as Anna Bensi, David Espinosa, known as DavidSiloetano, and the young influencers producing content for the social media accounts of Voz de Verdad (Voice of Truth), Fuera de la Caja (Out of the Box) and El4tico (a wordplay meaning the small room) have built a large audience on social media with content that reflects their Christianity but also rejects communism, blasts the government’s failed economic policies, and criticizes the lack of political liberties on the island.

Under Díaz-Canel, the Cuban government has passed several laws and decrees to punish the sharing of opposition views, including on social media. And yet, the Christian young influencers do not mince their words.

“The dictatorship isn’t going to fall just because I say so. It’s going to fall because they have nothing left to offer,” said Bensi in a viral Facebook video last month. “Why do you need more than a thousand political prisoners just to sleep soundly? Not even you yourselves buy into the communism narrative—because you aren’t communists; you are a private enterprise of repression. The [Communist Party] is not a political party; it is a cartel that hijacked an island and turned it into a family inheritance.”

The wrath of the government shortly followed.

Ernesto Ricardo Medina and Kamil Zayas Pérez, founders of El4tico, were arrested in a pre-dawn raid on their Holguín home in February and were charged with “propaganda against the constitutional order.”

In Havana, Bensi’s mother was interrogated, charged and placed under house arrest after Bensi filmed officers delivering a summons — and weeks later Bensi, 21, herself faced the same fate. David Espinosa and his wife were summoned by the Interior Ministry, while the four young activists of Fuera de la Caja Cuba, who had made a splash with their Make Cuba Great Again hats, had their phone lines cut by Etecsa, the state telecom monopoly, as punishment for standing outside the police station in solidarity with Bensi.

Iván Daniel Calás Navarro, founder of the Christian channel Voz de Verdad, had been interrogated and threatened with prison since 2023 and by March 2026 was forced into exile in Spain.

“The repression in Cuba is not only directed against those who protest or against historical figures of dissent. It also targets young people who report, comment or create content, and deliberately punishes their mothers, fathers and relatives as a form of coercion. This use of the family environment to sow fear reveals the extent of the closure of civic space in Cuba”, said Ana Piquer, the Americas director at Amnesty International, in a statement condemning state repression intensifying this year.

Lleonart, the activist and Baptist pastor, said he is not surprised the young Cubans have shown such courage in challenging the communist government so openly.

“Many of them are young people of the evangelical faith, and Cuban authorities fear them greatly because there is one thing they fail to realize: when one acts out of faith, it endows one with a strength—the faith that one is upheld by a higher power.”

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