The human rights organization Prisoners Defenders has documented 1,728 arrests for political reasons in communist Cuba since the massive peaceful protests that rocked communist Cuba in July 2021. Three years later, there are more than 1,100 Cubans, including children, still being held as political prisoners by the Castro dictatorship.
Via Martí Noticias (my translation):
The non-governmental organization Prisoners Defenders reported that, three years after the historic peaceful protests of July 11 in Cuba, they have documented a total of 1,728 political prisoners, of whom 1,117 remain incarcerated.
In their assessment three years after the historic popular protests, the independent organization Prisoners Defenders (PD) indicates that the number of political prisoners in Cuba totals 1,728.
Following some releases (611 due to sentence completion), as of June this year, the figure stands at 1,117, including the addition of five new political prisoners to this list, in what PD describes as “an escalation of criminal repression by the Cuban regime.”
At the time of the July 2021 national uprising, PD explains, records only counted 150 political prisoners.
Currently, 11,000 “young civilians, mostly Afro-Cubans not affiliated with opposition organizations, with average sentences of 2 years and 10 months, are suffering ‘pre-criminal’ convictions, meaning they have committed no crime or even attempted one,” states the human rights organization.
“For decades, an average of 3,850 people have been imprisoned annually for this reason, formerly known as ‘Pre-Delictive Social Dangerousness’ and continued under the new Penal Code as ‘Pre-criminal Disobedience,'” PD asserts.
Convicting and imprisoning innocent people for the crime of being nothing more than a perceived threat to Cuba’s communist dictatorship is not a bug of socialism, it’s a feature.