Cuba’s Anna Bensi and When the Hawk Fears the Dove
HAVANA TIMES – On this island, where official narratives are as tightly fitted as a corset and freedom of expression is practiced in secret, the figure of content creator Anna Sofía Benítez Silvente, known as Anna Bensi, is undoubtedly unusual.
She is a young woman of just 21 who, far from being a fleeting star in cyberspace, has become the protagonist of a real-life drama in which those in power appear as a hawk and she embodies the dove that, paradoxically, makes it afraid.
When she writes on social media, the innocent-looking young woman with long curls displays more courage and dignity than people twice her age.
Now she and her mother will go on trial, accused of violating personal and family privacy following a complaint allegedly filed by the police officer who showed up in plain clothes at their apartment on March 10 of this year to deliver a State Security summons addressed to her mother.
The messenger claims he was wronged because he was recorded while delivering the document, and under Article 393 of Cuba’s current Penal Code, this act “against personal and family privacy” is punishable by two to five years in prison.
As a result, both women were placed under house arrest and prohibited from leaving the country.
For this same reason, the young woman has already been summoned to the police station twice, most recently in July, when she was interrogated for more than 10 hours and emerged from the station in tears because of the pressure she had endured.
Another reason for this latest “interview” at the police station was that Anna planned to attend a reception for U.S. Independence Day at the residence of Mike Hammer, chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Havana, where she had been invited to perform the Cuban national anthem on the piano.
But despite all this, they have been unable to break her. Anna Bensi has continued speaking out, denouncing, among other things, that both she and her mother had been left completely cut off from communication, with no credit on their phone service and her WhatsApp account hacked, and that State Security forced Anna to stop working at a hairdressers.
Anna never tires of saying that she is not the leader of anything and does not belong to any opposition organization, but she makes it clear that she will not allow herself to be manipulated by anyone.
“I have faith that the truth must prevail. Expressing my political position and my thoughts about the reality I live in Cuba is not a crime,” she said.
In a system where the repressive apparatus often swoops down with the fury of a hawk, the apparent vulnerability of Anna and her mother seems bewildering to those persecuting them.
In April, she had been subjected to another interrogation and body search in the absence of her lawyer, after being told that she could not even travel to another province without notifying the authorities.
When she publicly expressed solidarity with influencers Kamil Zayas and Ernesto Ricardo Medina, who run the independent project El 4tico (The Little Room), she declared that she had already lost her fear because freedom is far more important.
Her individuality and independence are traits that in Cuba can be subversive in themselves.
The dove, a universal symbol of peace and fragility, here represents innocence and peaceful resistance. Thus, the fear of the hawk—so accustomed to hunting and intimidating—reveals the effectiveness of the message Anna seeks to convey and the danger it poses to those who hold power.
Her public accounts of the everyday hardships we endure—power outages, garbage everywhere, lack of transportation, water and medicine, among others—have been enough to set a disproportionate repressive machinery in motion, revealing the paranoid nature of a regime that feels threatened not by weapons or visible conspiracies, but by visibility itself.
Those in power fear transparency, afraid that the truth will resonate deeply among the population. Anna Bensi, therefore, is not simply an influencer; she is a dissident in the digital age whose crime is making the invisible visible.
The visit by police officer Yoel Leodan Rabaza to the young woman’s home in the Havana neighborhood of Alamar was initially routine, until someone decided to turn it into a political matter.
I can imagine the scene: Rabaza trying to downplay the matter, because it really is insignificant, while his superiors insist that he file a formal complaint so they can shift the circus of pressure and blackmail onto the family.
There were three months—the incident occurred in March and the accusation came in July—of undoubtedly “friendly” conversations with the officer, after they realized that charges could not be brought automatically and that his formal complaint was essential.
Anywhere else in the world, documenting a state representative while he is carrying out his official duties does not violate his privacy but instead constitutes a legitimate mechanism of citizen oversight. But we are in the land of magical realism.
Perhaps, deep down, this story is not only about Anna and her mother, but about all those Cuban men and women who confront censorship, fear and injustice with the only weapon they have: their voice. And although that voice may seem small and fragile, like that of a dove, it has shown that it can strike fear into even the most feared bird of prey.
And so, while the regime’s justice system prepares for their trial—still with no date set—the world watches as a case that might seem minor becomes a symbol of resistance, freedom and dignity in the face of a power that, unlike the hawk, would rather sink into silence than admit that it is afraid of a simple dove named Anna Bensi.