AREQUIPA, Peru – The non-governmental organization Prisoners Defenders recorded in its most recent report that at the end of November 2024 in Cuba There were 1,148 political prisoners, 34 more than the previous month.
In your monthly partthe Madrid-based NGO highlighted the new arrests are just “the tip of the iceberg of repression in Cuba.”
“In the last 12 months, the list of political prisoners in Cuba added a total of 155 new political prisoners (an average of 13 new ones each month). In that period, a total of 1,213 political prisoners were present on the list, all of them tortured in an eschatological way without there being any international reactions to prevent it,” the text underlines.
Likewise, the organization points out that the Island has had a total of 1,785 political prisoners present in its prisons from July 1, 2021 to the end of last November, in just 3 years and five months. Of that total, some 650 of the current prisoners suffer from medical pathologies caused and/or aggravated as a result of mistreatment.
The response of the Cuban regime to the massive and spontaneous mobilizations developed throughout the entire island to, for the most part, demand basic services has materialized in 30 of the 34 new political prisoners in November in Cuba, warns Prisoners Defenders.
The records point to 17 political prisoners in Villa Clara, 3 political prisoners in Ciego de Ávila, two political prisoners in Camagüey, seven political prisoners in Santiago de Cuba and one in Pinar del Río.
The NGO also denounces in the statement that the prolonged power outages have even worsened the living conditions for these prisoners. Added to the shortage of food and medicine, overcrowding and lack of medical care is the lack of access to water, increasing the risk of contracting different diseases and aggravating those they already suffer from.
In this regard, in November it was identified that 70 of the 1,148 political prisoners registered on our list suffer from clinically diagnosed mental health disorders and 650 suffer from various medical pathologies.
On the other hand, some three political prisoners have left the list last month, two of them after fully complying with the sanction or measure imposed and the withdrawal due to the death of the young Manuel de Jesús Guillén Esplugas after receiving a brutal beating on the 30th. November in prison Combined East of Havana.
“The number of prisoners who have been detained as minors has increased this month with three more minors, two of them detained for recent demonstrations (Roy Galindo, 17 years old, detained in Manicaragua, and Rafael Borrero Torres, detained for the Palmarito de Cauto demonstrations , Santiago de Cuba), which adds up to a total of 33 (31 boys and 2 girls),” the report highlights.
