Supreme Popular Court

The Tribunal Supremo Popular is Cuba's highest court, seated in Havana's old town and holding final say over criminal, civil, labour, economic and military cases nationwide. It sits in six chambers: penal, civil and administrative, offences against State Security, labour, economic, and military.

Its president is elected by the National Assembly of People's Power, on the recommendation of the Council of State's president, with no fixed term. The court is constitutionally described as functionally independent, but is hierarchically subordinate to the Assembly and the Council of State rather than a separate branch of government, which is why analysts treat its rulings as an extension of executive policy rather than independent judicial review.

In April 2026 the court rejected Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara's early-release appeal, ruling that his natural sentence-end date of 9 July 2026 stood and closing off the last legal route to release before a US dissident-release deadline. Otero disappeared from Guanajay prison the day before that date arrived.

The ruling is a plain illustration of the court's function inside Cuba's 2026 crackdown: its state-security and criminal chambers are the forum through which political prisoners, whose numbers Prisoners Defenders and OCDH logged at record highs through the year, move without an independent judiciary able to check the executive's charging decisions.