Cuba announces the release of more than 500 prisoners

VATICAN CITY - This decision was announced by the Havana Foreign Ministry as part of the mediation of the Catholic Church. It is also reported that President Miguel Díaz-Canel has addressed a letter to Pope Francis on this matter in recent days.

Vatican News

Gradual but large-scale dismissals in the context of mediation with the Catholic Church, which has been ongoing for several years. This was the statement issued yesterday, Tuesday 14 January, by the Cuban Foreign Ministry, which announced in a communiqué the decision to release 553 people "convicted of various crimes". The statement came just hours after the US administration of Joe Biden let it be known that it would remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, which includes countries such as North Korea, Iran and Syria. The note from Cuban diplomacy does not mention any direct link to the decision of the White House, where President-elect Donald Trump will soon take office, who in turn included Cuba on the same list during his first term.

The hope of Pope Francis

Havana, on the other hand, states that in early January, President Miguel Díaz-Canel wrote to Pope Francis, informing him of the decision to grant "freedom to 553 persons punished for various crimes". The Cuban government said that it had "maintained communication with Pope Francis and his representatives and, as in the past, informed His Holiness of the processes of review and release of persons deprived of their liberty", and recalled that "more than 10,000 persons sentenced to imprisonment" had been released from prison between 2023 and 2024 with "various types of benefits provided for by law". On the eve of the current Holy Year, the Pope called for forms of amnesty and remission of sentences in the Bull announcing the Jubilee, which he wished to dedicate to the theme "Pilgrims of Hope". The Havana Declaration recalls this Jubilee spirit.

Historical steps

In 1998, when St John Paul II visited the island, Fidel Castro released about 200 people. Thousands of prisoners were returned to freedom on the eve of Benedict XVI's visit to Cuba in 2012, and some 3 500 prisoners before the arrival of Pope Francis in 2015. Meanwhile, diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana were restored in December 2014. Both US President Barack Obama and his Cuban counterpart Raúl Castro thanked Pope Francis for his part in reaching this agreement.