The Cuban regime reactivates the death penalty for those who "attempt against the State"

The Havana regime announced extreme sanctions, ranging up to the death penalty or life imprisonment, for those who damage strategic assets and cause affectations to the "collective security." The death penalty in Cuba has not been applied since 2003.

Among the so-called "acts of vandalism" referred to in the new provision of the dictatorship are the damages "to means of public transportation, the theft of components of railroad lines and parts and pieces of locomotives, as well as the contamination of their fuel tanks, in addition to the occurrence of similar actions against generators and photovoltaic parks that are part of the National Electro-energy System.

It will also be interpreted as "sabotage," and will be judged as such, "actions against the infrastructure and services of telecommunications and information and communication technologies," as senior officials said on the island's national television.

It was Maricela Sosa Ravelo, the vice president of the People's Supreme Court, who announced that the Governing Council determined to interpret that the aforementioned conducts constitute "a crime of sabotage," as established in the current Penal Code.

Since February, officials of the Electrical Union (UNE) and the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) warned that the theft of electrical resources would be punished with severe penalties, including the classification of sabotage.

Cuban Penal Code and the death penalty

The new Criminal Code, approved in 2022, maintains the death penalty for 24 crimes, including 14 related to state security, eight specific to terrorism, one against public health (drugs) and murder.

In Cuba, capital punishment has been in moratorium since 2003, when it was last applied against three young Cubans between 18 and 25 years old, who hijacked a boat trying to reach the U.S., although without causing fatalities.

Between 1959 and 2003, thousands of Cubans were executed by firing squad, most of them in the early years of the dictatorship, and their "crimes" consisted of opposing the Castro brothers' regime.

The other major alert, according to Amnesty International, came in June 1999, when a report revealed that within three months at least ten people had been executed and at least five more had been sentenced to death. At the time of the document, there were approximately a dozen people in total on death row, many for "acts against the security of the state."