Cubans also want an amnesty for their political prisoners

Wilber Aguilar left his home in La Güinera on January 19, 2024, and arrived at the offices of the National Assembly of People’s Power (ANPP) in Central Havana, carrying an important document and a burning desire to see his son walk free. It was a petition for an Amnesty Law for Cuban political prisoners, among them Walniel Luis Aguilar Rivera, his 25-year-old son, who had taken to the streets during the popular protests of July 11, 2021, across Cuba and was ultimately sentenced to 12 years in prison for sedition. Yesterday, upon learning of the general amnesty for political prisoners in Venezuela, this father renewed his plea for his son’s return home with even greater force. “It’s been almost two years since I submitted the petition and I’m still waiting,” Aguilar told El PAÍS. “I’m just a man defending his family. All I’m demanding is freedom, an amnesty; we’re asking for an end to this injustice.”

The petition, addressed to Ana María Mari Machado, a member of the National Assembly who also sits on the Committee on Constitutional and Legal Affairs, stated that, having exhausted “all legal avenues to seek justice,” they were appealing for amnesty as a last resort, as protected by Article 61 of the Constitution. Chapter XX of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Cuba defines amnesty as “the commutation of the sentence imposed on someone who has committed a crime and entails the forgetting of the offense, the elimination of criminal proceedings, and the pardon of the sanction.” This is precisely what the signatories were requesting: recognition that “no crime was committed” in the protests against the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel, which resulted in more than 1,000 political prisoners in a country on the brink of one of its greatest crises.

At the time, the Cuban government responded that, after examining the request, the process was “inadmissible for not meeting the requirements of the Law.” Now, with the announcement by Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, of the release of hundreds of political prisoners under an amnesty, and the evidence of some 20 releases in Nicaragua, many Cubans are wondering what the Havana government will do for the victims of its policies, given that the island is also at the negotiating table with the Trump administration.

“What is happening in Venezuela demonstrates that international pressure and persistent citizen demands can generate concrete changes. It is time to intensify the demands on Cuba,” asserts the activist Carolina Barrero, who for several years has accompanied the families of Cuban political prisoners in their pursuit of amnesty. “Cuba should pass a similar law that covers all political prisoners from 1959 to the present,” she maintains.

In this context, Amnesty International demanded that Cuban authorities “free, without conditions, those who never should have been imprisoned. President Díaz-Canel must take an unequivocal decision: end the use of thecriminal justice system to silence criticism and punish activism.”

If the petition, which has so far gathered some 2,000 signatures, is approved, it would be the first time the Castroist regime grants this type of acquittal in its 67 years in power. On other occasions, the government has resorted to legal mechanisms such as pardons, parole, or early release, “mechanisms that, rather than extinguishing or commuting sentences, allow the government to maintain permanent control over the beneficiaries,” explains the legal expert Eloy Viera Cañibe.

The amnesty “is not reversible”

In 1998, when Pope John Paul II called for the release of prisoners during his visit to Cuba, Fidel Castro let 200 people out of prison. In 2003, some of the 75 dissidents arrested during the crackdown known as the Black Spring were released on parole following negotiations with the Vatican and the government of former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. As Pope Benedict XVI’s visit approached in 2011, the Cuban government released 2,900 prisoners. In 2015, ahead of Pope Francis’ visit, some 3,522 inmates were freed. The last of the releases announced by the regime was in January 2025, when authorities agreed to release more than 500 inmates, after a mediation with the Catholic Church and the Biden administration’s pact to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, to which Donald Trump returned it on his first day in the White House.

These recent releases, however, were surrounded by restrictions, exile, and threats from the Cuban government, which even returned some of the acquitted political prisoners to their jail cells. For this reason, citizens are now demanding an amnesty that guarantees their complete release. According to Viera, this “is the ideal mechanism to address the structural conflict associated with political imprisonment, a practice that has been the norm for decades in Cuba and that stems from the regime’s sustained confrontation with those who publicly oppose it.”

“Amnesty implies, above all, the explicit recognition of the existence of this conflict and the acceptance that certain behaviors, committed in a specific period, should never have been classified as crimes or punished criminally,” says the jurist, who insists that amnesty “is not reversible” because it is not a conditional release, “but the legal acknowledgment that certain actions should never have been punished, insofar as the motivation that supported their repression was strictly political.”

Washington’s plans with Havana remain unclear. While the Díaz-Canel government has denied that any dialogue is taking place, Trump, who urged them to reach an agreement “before it’s too late,” also asserted aboard Air Force One that the two governments were holding talks. The Cubans insist that any negotiations must prioritize the release of political prisoners.

Miryorly García Prieto, one of the Cuban citizens coordinating the amnesty campaign, believes this is not only a timely moment to see the petition through to the end, but an “urgent” one as well. “This Amnesty petition has a humanitarian character; the lives of innocent human beings are in danger,” says Prieto, alluding to the context of total economic collapse the country has reached in the last five years. “Today, misery is being used as a form of torture, and the number of people dying in state custody has risen. It is a cycle that must end, and only the people themselves, who must empower themselves and act as citizens, can stop it. Amnesty can put an end to a conflict that has become a dead end for the state itself.”

García Prieto also believes, like others, that amnesty is the only way to begin a path toward national reconciliation. “For years, the government has used political prisoners as bargaining chips, primarily with the United States, in negotiations that are always murky and secretive. Then it exiles them or places them under a repressive and brutal control, and returns them to prison at the first sign of political dissent, treating them as repeat offenders and imposing severe penalties. The only way to truly free them is to pressure the State to recognize the political nature of the conflict and exonerate them of crimes they never committed.”

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