Human Rights Watch releases damning report condemning abuses against protesters in Cuba

The Cuban government engaged in systematic abuses against people arrested for protesting in July as part of a plan to suppress dissent, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Tuesday that documents 130 cases of arbitrary arrests, ill-treatment of detainees, and abuse-ridden criminal prosecutions.

According to the report, many of the detainees were held “incommunicado for days or even weeks, violently arrested, and, in some cases, ill-treated during detention.” Abuses in prison included being forced to “squat naked, apparently deliberately deprived of sleep, brutally beaten, and held in cells without natural light” or with little access to clean water.

The organization also says Cuban authorities systematically violated detainees’ rights to a fair trial, conducting summary trials and denying access to lawyers.

The New York-based watchdog organization said its investigators conducted more than 150 interviews, reviewed files, and verified images to document the 130 arrests of people across the island. The report says the information published about each case is based on direct accounts of the person detained, a relative, or their lawyer.

“When thousands of Cubans took to the streets in July, the Cuban government responded with a brutal strategy of repression designed to instill fear and suppress dissent,” said Juan Pappier, senior Americas researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Peaceful protesters and other critics have been systematically detained, held incommunicado and abused in horrendous conditions, and subjected to sham trials following patterns that indicate these human rights violations are not the actions of rogue agents.”

In a press conference in Miami on Tuesday, HRW’s director for the Americas, José Miguel Vivanco, said that the repression against the detainees was not accidental but “a state policy sanctioned at the highest level, to stop and prevent any effort of the Cuban people to exercise their right to peaceful protest.”

The activist called on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and the Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, to condemn the Cuban government.

“If we forget about Cuba, if we normalize the repression in Cuba and assume that this is predictable, that there are no freedoms there, that these people are condemned to live in those conditions, it is challenging for conditions to improve,” he said. “It requires a concerted, universal pressure, an alliance of democracies that demand a transition to democracy in Cuba.”

Vivanco also urged the Biden administration to remove the decades-long embargo on the island. He said that the “unilateral sanctions” of the United States against the Cuban government were “counterproductive” and a diplomatic obstacle for other countries to condemn Cuba’s “deplorable” human rights record.