Ariel Manuel Martin Barroso has not set foot on a university campus for almost a year, although he has more than enough credentials to lead a classroom. The professor from the Faculty of Technical and Business Sciences at the University of Sancti Spíritus was sentenced in September 2025 to a combined penalty of ten years in prison for painting phrases against the Communist Party regime; some were directed at President Miguel Diaz-Canel. However, since February 25, 2025, he had already been enduring the rigors of political imprisonment, which allegedly caused him severe depression, according to family sources consulted by El Toque.

“He is an extremely noble person; he’s never been ‘streetwise.’ We didn’t dare publicize this out of fear they would retaliate more against him in prison, but the abuse is already too much and we decided to make his case known,” his cousin Jorge Luis González, who lives in the United States, explained to the outlet.

According to a ruling from the Provincial People’s Court of Villa Clara, accessed by elTOQUE, the charges used to convict Martín Barroso were “propaganda against the constitutional order” and “contempt.” In the proceedings, he was accused of writing anti-government slogans on walls at the Sancti Spiritus university and other locations around the city at various times between 2024 and early 2025.

The Observatory of Academic Freedom — the organization that first reported the case — describes the political prisoner as a “researcher and professor with institutional prestige and recognition among students,” worthy of distinction as “author of the best doctoral thesis” of 2023 in the Faculty of Accounting and Finance at the University of Havana.

On January 15, 2024, the University of Sancti Espiritus congratulated Ariel Manuel Martín Barroso (among other professors) on its official Facebook page for obtaining the academic rank of PhD in Sciences. Martin also served as a member of the National Accreditation Board of the Ministry of Higher Education.

According to the Observatory of Academic Freedom, the professor “was subjected to surveillance by State Security agents who monitor the university campus, and who testified against him”; they prejudged him, labeling him a habitual “suspect” because of “the way he conducted himself against the revolutionary process.”

The ruling obtained by El Toque identifies State Security officer Arianna Rojas Díaz and Interior Ministry (Minint) officer Dania Iris Rodríguez — agents “assigned to the university” — as witnesses for the prosecution.

To convict the political prisoner, the judges of the Villa Clara court — Grisel Santos Suarez, Noralmis Blanco Echarte, and Ricardo Hernandez Domínguez — also considered testimony from the university rector, Edelvy Bravo Amarante, and the provincial Transportation delegate in Sancti Spíritus, Jose Lorenzo Garcia.

Ileana Curra Lusson, a former political prisoner and exile who published part of the ruling, has reported that the university professor is being held at the maximum-security “Nieves Morejón” prison (Sancti Spíritus), a facility with “countless complaints about inhumane and unsanitary conditions, as well as abuse of inmates.”

Ariel Manuel Martín was held “incommunicado for five or six months” after his detention in February 2025, his cousin Jorge Luis Gonzalez told El Toque.

The relative says that during some prison visits Martin Barroso has appeared “very depressed, but Ariel is not someone who talks much and he expresses little about what he is going through in there.”

According to Gonzalez, his cousin had made no public political statements for most of his life. However, “he is a fan of the works of Cuban national hero Jose Martí, and we used to talk about that, which gradually changed his thinking” about the country’s situation.

One event is identified by the family member as a trigger for the university professor’s politicization, at least in private. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ariel’s mother died of cancer at home without receiving adequate medical care, according to Gonzalez.

“That was his breaking point. During one of our last conversations, he told me: ‘Cousin, I’m already 40 years old — what am I in life, with so many degrees and studies? What am I in this country? Nobody,’” the relative recounts.

The case of the Sancti Spíritus academic is not unusual in Cuba. A special report by the Observatory of Academic Freedom, published in December 2025, documented at least 18 cases of Cuban professors and students “victims of government repression against the July 11, 2021 protesters.”

Following those mass protests across the country, the persecution of regime critics has not diminished. Different human rights organizations record between 753 and 1,207 people imprisoned for demonstrating in public spaces, affiliating with dissident groups, or expressing opinions on social media.

Cuban economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrono, a professor at the Javeriana University of Cali (Colombia), described the proceedings against Ariel Manuel Martín as a “vulgar injustice” that “only occurs in dictatorial regimes.”

De Miranda Parrono added on Facebook: “While the country sinks into the most terrible misery, amid the incompetence and neglect of those who cling at all costs to power; and the external pressures that batter an entire society that can no longer endure — it seems the only resources available [to the State] (…) are devoted to the cruelest repression.”

In reality, the “crime” the authorities cannot forgive is his consistency with the writings of Jose Marti, one of his intellectual heroes: “Freedom is the right that every man has to be honorable, and to think and speak without hypocrisy. (…) A man who obeys a bad government, without working to make the government good, is not an honorable man.”

The Observatory of Academic Freedom has called on the international academic community for “solidarity, accompaniment, and amplification of such a grave human rights violation.”

Meanwhile, people close to Ariel Manuel Martín hope that breaking the silence about his case will help the university professor obtain justice. “That young man is a brilliant mind — the pride of the family,” his cousin Jorge Luis González concluded.

El Toque sent requests for comment to the Ministry of Higher Education and the University of Sancti Spiritus regarding Professor Martín Barroso’s situation and Observatory of Academic Freedom’’s statement, but as of the publication of this article, no response had been received.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.