Reply #1: It would be interesting to see any evidence for the claim "Castro has executed 16 000 people" [View All]

[struggle4progress]

I do not mean, in any sense, to belittle the seriousness of capital punishment as a human rights violation, wherever it occurs

Nevertheless, one has a certain moral obligation to be as accurate as possible, because knowledge of the actual facts is critical for effective action

For Castro to have executed 16 000 people, it would be necessary for the Cubans to have executed about 6 people a week every week since the fall of Batista. While there is no doubt Cuba has continued to execute people, Cuba is not sufficiently isolated, from the rest of the world, for such a high execution rate to remain entirely undocumented. The available information suggests a much lower execution rate:

... In March 1999, the provincial court in Granma announced the executions of two men, José Luis Osorio Zamora and Francisco Javier Chávez Palacios. Cuba reportedly executed two prisoners, Emilio Betancourt Bonne and Jorge LuisSánchez Guilarte, in May 1998.Human Rights Watch interviews with former political prisoners reveal that up until early 1998, Cuba had several death row prisoners held in at least three maximum-security prisons. The ex-prisoners, who usually were confined in cells alongside the death row inmates, also believed that Cuba carried out executions in 1997. Human Rights Watch received credible information that a Cuban firing squad executed Daniel Reyes, an inmate in the Las Tunas Provincial Prison, on October 29, 1997 ... Cuba reportedly executed another prisoner at the Agüica Prison in Matanzas in January 1997. A political prisoner confined there at the time recalled that the executed prisoner's first name was Gilbert, that he had been convicted of murder, and that he was blind. Cuba executed Francisco Dayson Dhruyet, convicted for the murder of his wife, in December 1996. We also received reports of possible executions at the Combinado del Este Prison in Havana in 1996 and 1997 ... http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1999/cuba/Cuba996-07.htm

Of course, a careful analysis would take into account different historical figures, but the total executions in the period immediately after the fall of Batista is usually estimated in the scores or hundreds, not in the thousands, and the available estimates for the following decades do not yield anything like the 16 000 figure cited in the newspaper article


Cuba ceases fire, for now
April 30, 2008 at 10:26 AM
... Past Monday, new Cuban President Raul Castro announced that all death sentences had been commuted to prison terms of 30 years to life, with the exception of 3 people charged with terrorism. Elizardo Sánchez, president of the dissident Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said that according to his group's estimates, around 30 people on death row will benefit from the decision. Some of them have been awaiting execution for more than 10 years ... http://blogs.amnestyusa.org/death-penalty/archive/2008/04/30/cuba-ceases-fire--for-now.htm