Cuban activist Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known as Anna Bensi, rejected counterintelligence agents' pressure to stay silent or go into exile after a case against her was shelved. The agents offered help in her music career in exchange for cooperation during a meeting at Alamar Police Station on April 13. Bensi denounced the psychological tactics and veiled threats in a live video.
The Havana Provincial Prosecutor’s Office shelved the case against Anna Bensi and her mother, Caridad Silvente, for filming a plainclothes agent delivering a summons to their home. This lifted precautionary measures such as bans on inter-provincial and international travel. However, after signing the documents on April 13 at Alamar Police Station, three unidentified counterintelligence agents tried to recruit her.
“They gave me three options: keep quiet, go into exile, or regret spending my youth in prison,” Bensi recounted in a 22-minute live Facebook video. The agents promised support in the music world if she cooperated and discouraged her from trusting activists like José Daniel Ferrer or journalists in the US and Spain. They also made vague allusions to possible consequences if she continued criticizing the regime.
The incident is part of recent harassment. In early March, her mother filmed the agent, leading to charges of “propaganda against the constitutional order.” In April, the US chargé d’affaires in Cuba, Mike Hammer, visited the family, after which pressures intensified, including summoning her sister Elmis Rivero Silvente, a US citizen.
“All these injustices only prove what they so strongly deny being: a dictatorship,” Bensi stated, vowing not to be silenced unless imprisoned.
