Prisoners Defenders, the Madrid-based diaspora rights monitor, published its census on Thursday 9 July, the fifth anniversary of the 11J protests, recording 1,306 political prisoners against 1,281 on 11 June and documenting 40 detained minors, 16 of them held in adult facilities1.
11J refers to 11 July 2021, when tens of thousands of Cubans marched in dozens of towns in the largest demonstrations the island had seen since 1959. The sentences handed down afterwards, many for public disorder or sedition, are what much of this registry counts. A net rise of 25 in a month, five years on, describes a caseload still growing rather than working itself through.
The minors category has not appeared in this dispatch before, and it rests on Prisoners Defenders alone. No other monitor publishes a detained-minors figure for Cuba to set beside it. Lowdown has not re-verified the registry case by case, and the Cuban state publishes no roster of political prisoners at all, which is the reason a diaspora-maintained count exists to be argued over in the first place. Sixteen children held among adults would, in most jurisdictions, be the line that draws a United Nations special-procedures enquiry; here it arrives as a row in a spreadsheet kept 7,000km away by people the state calls mercenaries.
