Cuba has granted early release to 553 prisoners, completing a deal struck in the final days of Joe Biden’s US presidency that his successor Donald Trump later abandoned, a Supreme Court official said Monday.
“The process was successfully completed,” the court’s vice president Maricela Soza Ravelo said on state television, noting that 378 applications had been filed in January and 175 in February.
In one of his final official acts, Biden on January 14 removed Cuba from a US list of state terror sponsors in return for the communist island agreeing to free 553 prisoners.
But six days later marked the swearing-in of Trump, who swiftly overturned the Vatican-mediated deal after just 192 confirmed releases of people dubbed “political prisoners” by rights groups.
Most had been rounded up in a crackdown on rare mass protests against the Cuban government in July 2021.
The prisoner releases stopped after Trump’s order, but then resumed sporadically in the ensuing weeks, according to several human rights groups.
Cuban authorities have never made public a list of the prisoners being released, nor a timetable.
For its part, the “Todos” platform that collates information from several non-governmental organizations has counted 212 releases, including that of opposition leader Jose Daniel Ferrer and dissident Felix Navarro.
Dissident artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara and Maykel Osorbo, who have been sentenced to five and seven years’ imprisonment respectively, have not been released.
According to official figures, around 500 demonstrators arrested over the July 2021 protests have been sentenced, in some cases to up to 25 years in prison.
Some have already been released after serving their sentences.
Human rights NGOs and the US embassy in Havana estimate that there are around 1,000 political prisoners on the island.