With 17 who entered the list last May and 28 who came out -most of them after serving their sentences in full-, the number of political prisoners compiled each month by the organization Prisoners Defenders (PD) is today of 1,037. In the last year, says the Madrid-based NGO, they have been able to confirm 246 new political prisoners.
In its report, published this Wednesday, PD highlights from the list the 35 minors under 18 years of age (31 boys and 4 girls), of whom 32 are serving sentences and 3 are criminally prosecuted.
“It must be taken into account that the current high number, however, does not include many other children who have already left the list for having fully served their sentences,” warns the text, which denounces that part of these minors are in ” comprehensive training schools”, which are actually “totally penitentiary centers” that “do not depend on the Ministry of Education, but on the Ministry of the Interior”.
The organization cites the United Nations, of whom it remembers that it confirmed in a 2022 report that in these “prisons, with cells”, a minimum of 150 children under the age of 16 are imprisoned each year and that around 260 between the ages of 16 and 17 are imprisoned in conventional prisons. This makes a total of 410 minors who “suffer imprisonment.”
“It must be taken into account that the current high number, however, does not include many other children who have already left the list for having fully served their sentences”
May was the month of the visit of the high representative for European foreign policy, Josep Borrellwhom PD reproaches “for not meeting with anyone from civil society or having a single word of encouragement for prisoners of conscience and their families.”
“All this despite the fact that Mr. Borrell’s closest team knows perfectly well, since he has read it with interest, that all of the more than 1,000 political prisoners in Cuba are being tortured, 80% of them with more than 5 different types of torture, including minors, young people and women,” the statement stated.
The report also has words for the growing relations between Cuba and Russia, a situation that the organization assures the Island seeks “in order to maintain a regime of identity and parasitic trajectory that does not stop sinking and, with it, sinking its people.”
The Cuban regime’s rapprochement with Moscow was also highlighted in its monthly report by the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights (OCDH), which believes that the revitalized diplomatic relations “do not augur positive changes in terms of freedoms.”
This organization, also based in Madrid, recorded at least 354 “repressive actions” on the island during May, of which 83 were some type of arbitrary detention.
In addition, he lashed out at his monthly release against the high representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, who visited Havana at the end of May and who they reproach for “ignoring the human rights agenda on the Island and not having a word of encouragement for the relatives of the more than a thousand political prisoners.”
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