The latest report from the World Prison Brief now ranks communist Cuba as the country with the second-highest incarceration rate in the world. Cuba is second only to El Salvador, which recently incarcerated thousands of murderous gang members who have been terrorizing the country. Of course, if you take into consideration that Cuba is in reality an island prison with over 11-million inmates, it would take first place easily.
Via Martí Noticias (my translation):
Cuba takes second place in the world for prison population
Cuba ranks second globally in incarceration rate, according to data confirmed by the World Prison Brief (WPB), an online database on prison systems worldwide.
WPB, hosted at the Institute for Criminal Policy Research (ICPR) at the University of London, reports that at least 90,000 people are imprisoned on the island, a figure surpassed only by El Salvador.
“In 2020, with the support of the Spanish Transition Foundation [and its director Pablo Zabala], Civil Rights Defenders [with Erik Jennische, its director for Latin America], and with the presence of MEPs Javier Nart and Leopoldo López Gil, Spanish deputy Carlos Rojas, and other personalities, Prisoners Defenders demonstrated with internal evidence from the Ministry of the Interior, both the prison population of Cuba and national repression statistics in all areas, including an investigation of pre-criminal supplementary sentences, for which we paid Cuban officials for the police records of all pre-criminal prisoners, and, in addition, each record cost us cents,” explained Javier Larrondo, the president of Prisoners Defenders, to Martí Noticias.
“We revealed that Cuba had 90,000 prisoners in prisons and another 37,500 convicted under house arrest or forced labor without imprisonment,” added Larrondo.
“This entity has taken more than 3 years to verify all the documents sent, but, upon confirmation, we are pleased that Cuba finally, officially, ranks as the second country by prison rate in the world, with the exact rate we calculated then, 794 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants, only behind El Salvador, which has tens of thousands of prisoners, but from the gangs,” emphasized the Cuban-Spanish activist.
According to the renowned database, Cuba has 794 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants.
“This corresponds to the number of crimes in the Cuban Penal Code, crimes that would not be so in any other country operating under a different regime, other than a police state. Above all, economic crimes are very abundant and among other things, are due to the lack of consumer goods. Other crimes that are occurring a lot are violent crimes against people, sometimes unjustified violent acts,” said lawyer Hildebrando Chaviano from the city of Cienfuegos.
“There are several causes related to this, firstly, the lack of spirituality that the Cuban people have. Cubans have lost that education, that Christian formation. It has become a very materialistic society, and that’s why there have to be crimes that originate in those material needs, and the prisons are full of young people from the so-called ‘new man’ generation because there is no other way to survive: young people either leave the country or stay in their country committing crimes, seeking a living, as many say, ‘struggling’ because there are many possible crimes to commit, and many crimes are penalized with prison,” Chaviano explained.
WPB’s data is used by regional standardization organizations, national governments, journalists, civil society organizations, and social researchers.
Independent organizations have consistently argued about the living conditions in Cuban prisons, where inmates are subjected to abuses of power and mistreatment by authorities, suffer from malnutrition, overcrowding, lack of hygiene, and deficient medical care.
“One thing is the economic situation, and another is the social situation we have: impoverishment in all areas, the lack of moral values, there are no principles,” lamented Chaviano.
“As for political prisoners, something similar happens: there are over 1,000 political prisoners. Any public demonstration can be considered a common crime, but in reality, we know that they are political crimes. It is a political crime even to express oneself against the government,” pointed out the jurist.
Lawyer Alaín Espinosa, from the legal advisory center Cubalex, added that “this is mainly due to the lack of independence of the judiciary in Cuba. It makes political policies prevail over the correct application of the principles of the judicial function.”
He added that, on the island, “judges respond to the interests of the executive power and not to the law, therefore, their rulings do not correspond to a casuistic analysis based on the free appreciation of evidence, the search for objective truth, proportionality, and impartiality.”
This subordination of the judicial power to the executive also allows for the disregard of the right to due process and the destruction of the presumption of innocence without the necessary burden of proof, and, consequently, most people end up being convicted, emphasized Espinosa.
“A proof of this is the repeated expressions of the president of the Supreme People’s Court who at one point went so far as to qualify Cuban judges as ‘judges of the revolution,’ or to consider lawyers as an obstacle when imposing sentences on the accused, comparing them to dogs in tobacco fields,” he pointed out from Buenos Aires, the Cubalex expert.