Within the space of a few hours on 14 January US President Joe Biden removed Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and Cuba’s foreign ministry announced that hundreds of prisoners would be released after talks with the Vatican. It all comes very late in the day. Biden transfers power on 20 January to Donald Trump, who added Cuba to the list at a similarly late stage in his first term in January 2021. Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles, is an extreme hardliner on Cuba, intent on turning the screw on its communist government.
Cuba’s foreign ministry said that 553 prisoners, convicted of “diverse crimes”, would be “gradually” released in what it described as “a common practice in our justice system”. In an official statement it said that President Miguel Díaz-Canel had sent a letter to Pope Francis earlier this month to confirm the prisoner release as part of discussions with the Vatican. Church intercession secured the release of 3,522 prisoners when Pope Francis visited the island in 2015, and, most recently, 2,604 inmates were freed in 2019.
In a statement of its own, the White House explicitly related the decision to remove Cuba from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism to the prisoner release. The Cuban foreign ministry did not make the link, although it issued a separate statement, responding positively to Cuba’s removal from the list, as “a decision in the right direction”, but added that it was of “limited scope” given “the economic blockade and dozens of [other] coercive measures” and “should have happened years ago as a fundamental act of justice, without demanding anything in return and without fabricating pretexts”.
Whether all of the 553 prisoners are released must be subject to doubt. The Cuban government has begun to release prisoners, with 18 freed in the hours after the announcement, but bilateral relations with the US will soon deteriorate sharply. The incoming Trump administration, especially with Rubio at the helm of foreign policy, is likely to seek to tighten restrictions on Cuba. There are also domestic political considerations at play and Trump has a predilection for undoing the work of his Democratic predecessors, previously having put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism after Barack Obama had first removed the country from it in 2015.
Political prisoners
There are 1,148 political prisoners in Cuba (not recognised as such by the government), according to the most recent estimate by the Spain-based NGO Prisoners Defenders last November. About half of their number are made up of people who took part in the large-scale anti-government protests of 11 July 2021.