Thursday, July 16, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
RIGHTS-CUBA: Opposition Group Calls for End to Death Penalty
Dalia Acosta
- Cuba is one of the countries that makes the most frequent use of the death penalty, relative to its population, protested an internal opposition group which wants the government of Fidel Castro to abolish capital punishment.
The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN) said it was “disturbing” that in proportional terms, Cuba resorts to capital punishment twice as often as China and five times as often as the United States.
Legal executions stood at 2.6 per million inhabitants in Iran, 2.1 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1.9 in Cuba, 0.9 in China, and 0.4 in the United States in 1999, according to information cited by the CCDHRN, a group that is not legally recognised in Cuba.
“We estimate that between 20 and 30 people were executed by firing squad in 1999” in Cuba, states the report signed by Elizardo Sánchez, the president of the illegal opposition group.
In the United States, a country of 268 million, 98 people were executed last year, while in Cuba, population 11.2 million, as many as 30 were executed, the CCDHRN pointed out.
The London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International reports that China, population 1.2 billion, leads the world in terms of absolute number of executions, although several other countries apply capital punishment more often in relative terms.
The CCDHRN was able to verify the names of 21 people executed last year in Cuba, and those of another 24 people still on death row, including two Salvadorans sentenced to death last year for a series of bombings targetting Cuba’s tourist industry in 1997, in which a visiting Italian businessman was killed.
With official information unavailable, the commission drew up its partial list based on direct contact with the families of those on death row, and inquiries carried out throughout the country.
The group, which has been waiting to be granted legal status since 1987, is the only non-governmental organisation in Cuba that periodically releases detailed reports on prisoners of conscience, prisoners on death row and executions.
The number of executions documented by the CCDHRN was higher than the total reported last April by Amnesty International, according to which 13 people were executed in Cuba in 1999, while nine others remained on death row.
Amnesty International reported that five countries — China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States — accounted for around 85 percent of the executions carried out last year worldwide.
The total number of executions worldwide dropped from 2,258 to 1,813 from 1998 to 1999, although the number rose in Saudi Arabia, the United States and Iran. Another 3,857 people were sentenced to death in 63 countries in the same period.
By the beginning of the 20th century, only three countries had permanently abolished the death penalty. Today, at the start of the 21st century, 108 countries have done so by law or in practice, in accordance with the global tendency, stressed the international rights group.
Sánchez called on the Cuban government “to join the global tendency to abolish the death penalty, and to declare an immediate moratorium” on executions.
He also urged the international community to continue pressing Havana to bring to a halt its “machinery for exterminating human beings with the premedidation and ceremony used by states which continue to apply such an uncivilised form of punishment.”
Cuban authorities say the death penalty is “an exceptional measure applied in the case of especially appalling crimes,” and that it will not be eliminated as long as “Cuba remains a target of U.S. aggression.”
A February 1999 reform of the penal code adopted the life sentence and expanded the application of the death penalty to crimes of drug trafficking with aggravating circumstances, violent assault and corruption of minors.
Under Cuban law, neither people under 20 nor pregnant women can be sentenced to death. According to official sources, no woman has been sentenced to death since President Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.
The CCDHRN report states that “murder was the primary reason capital punishment was meted out in all of the known cases of deaths by firing squad in 1999.”
But according to Sánchez, the fact that the death sentence is applied in the case of common crimes runs counter to the government’s argument that capital punishment must be maintained due to the hostile relations between Cuba and the United States.
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RIGHTS-CUBA: Opposition Group Calls for End to Death Penalty
Dalia Acosta
- Cuba is one of the countries that makes the most frequent use of the death penalty, relative to its population, protested an internal opposition group which wants the government of Fidel Castro to abolish capital punishment.
(more…)
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