Cuba's April Amnesty Left More Than 1,200 Political Prisoners Behind Bars

The Cuban government's announcement that it had pardoned 2,010 prisoners arrived packaged as a "sovereign and humanitarian gesture," the island's largest amnesty in ten years. Four days after those prison gates opened in early April, the arithmetic of that claim began to collapse under independent scrutiny.

Cuba Center's detailed brief, published April 7, drew on cross-verified tallies from Prisoners Defenders, Cubalex and the Cuban Observatory for Human Rights to reach a stark conclusion: the vast majority of those freed were common criminals, and more than 1,200 political prisoners and prisoners of conscience remained behind bars, untouched by the pardon.

The mechanism is almost bureaucratic in its precision. Cuban pardons routinely exclude offenses classified as crimes "against security," the same legal category authorities apply to prosecute dissent. When political detention is labeled a security crime, amnesty legislation designed to signal openness simply does not reach it. The government released no list of the names of those freed during the amnesty, a standard omission that makes independent corroboration by human rights groups significantly harder.

Among those the amnesty bypassed: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, founder of the San Isidro Movement, has been held at Guanajay maximum-security prison since his arrest during the July 11, 2021 protests, serving a five-year sentence. He began a hunger strike in December 2025, and his health has deteriorated significantly. By March 2026, his family reported death threats and fears of a sentence extension. Then there is Maykel Castillo Pérez, known as Maykel Osorbo, Grammy-winning co-author of the protest anthem "Patria y Vida," detained since May 2021 and serving a nine-year sentence for his activism. Félix Navarro Rodríguez, founder of the Pedro Luis Boitel Party for Democracy, had already been freed once: released earlier in 2025 as part of a Vatican-brokered prisoner deal, he was re-arrested in April 2025 after Cuban authorities accused him of violating parole terms, and has been held in prolonged isolation since, with advocates warning about his deteriorating health. Cuba Center also named Saylí Navarro Álvarez among those whose cases remain unresolved.

The brief documents broader patterns of denied medical care, solitary confinement, malnutrition and inhumane cell conditions across the political prisoner population, alongside systematic harassment of prisoners' families.

One figure stands as its own indictment: Cuba has not permitted the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons since 1989. That 37-year exclusion explains why family testimony and exile monitoring groups remain the primary evidence base, and why independent tallies diverge so sharply from official counts.

Alongside the report, Cuba Center launched a Change.org petition titled "Urgent Request to Prioritize the Release of Cuban Political Prisoners," calling for immediate diplomatic pressure from the United States, the Holy See, the European Union and Canada, and demanding unconditional releases and immediate ICRC access. The Vatican's mediation produced the January 2025 deal that briefly freed Navarro before his re-arrest. That precedent is precisely what the petition is trying to leverage again, at a scale the earlier deal never reached.