Cuba has granted first release to 553 captives, completing a bargain struck in the last days of Joe Biden’s US president that his son Donald Trump afterwards abandoned, a Supreme Court national said Monday.
” The operation was successfully completed”, the judge’s vice president Maricela Soza Ravelo said on state television, noting that 378 software had been filed in January and 175 in February.
In one of his last official functions, Biden on January 14 removed Cuba from a US record of state terror donors in return for the communist island agreeing to free 553 captives.
But six days later marked the swearing-in of Trump, who soon overturned the Vatican-mediated offer after just 192 confirmed discharges of persons dubbed “political prisoners” by rights groups.
Most had been rounded up in a crackdown on unusual mass protests against the Cuban government in July 2021.
The slave releases stopped after Trump’s order, but finally resumed intermittently in the ensuing months, according to several human rights groups.
Cuban authorities have not made people a list of the captives being released, nor a calendar.
For its part, the” Todos” app that collates data from various non-governmental companies has counted 212 produces, including that of opposition head Jose Daniel Ferrer and rebel Felix Navarro.
Rebel designers Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Maykel Osorbo, who have been sentenced to five and seven years ‘ prison both, have not been released.
According to standard statistics, around 500 protesters arrested over the July 2021 rallies have been sentenced, in some cases to up to 25 years in prison.
Some have already been released after serving their words.
Animal rights NGOs and the US embassy in Havana calculate that there are around 1, 000 political prisoners on the island.
