A human rights in Cuba update. Havana’s vote at the UN against Moscow returning kidnapped Ukrainian children. Petition to Diaz-Canel.
December 10, 2025 marks the observance of international human rights day. This past week both domestically and internationally Havana continued to play a negative role on the human rights front.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
Cuban prisoner of conscience and artist turns 38 in prison on December 2nd, and initiates 10 day 12 hour fast to protest his unjust imprisonment.
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who turned 38 years old in prison on December 2nd, “is fasting in Guanajay Prison outside Havana to protest the injustice of his imprisonment and that of the other political prisoners in Cuba. The fast will last every day from 6 am to 6 pm until December 12.” Jostein Hole Kobbeltvedt, Executive Director of the Rafto Foundation for Human Rights spoke out in solidarity with the Cuban artivist, “Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is imprisoned for standing up for the basic right to freedom of speech through art. We call for the immediate release of him, and all other political prisoners in Cuba.”
On December 3, 2025 Artists at Risk Connection expressed its grave concern for Cuban artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, who, as of December 1, has reportedly begun a voluntary fast “while imprisoned in Cuba in protest of his continued imprisonment and the broader restrictions on artistic and political expression in the country. This drastic act underscores the desperation of an artist who has been unjustly deprived of his liberty for years, and highlights the extreme and worsening repression faced by artists and independent voices on the island. ARC urges Cuban authorities to immediately release Otero Alcántara and all unjustly detained artists and prisoners of conscience in Cuba.”
Florida International University professor Daniel I. Pedreira, former CFC program officer, presented his book “The disappeared under Castroism since 1959” at Books and Books in Coral Gables.
His full presentation is available online on YouTube.
Cuban based human rights organization reports 150 inmates have died since January 2024 under conditions that violate UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners at the Boniato Maximum Security Prison in Eastern Cuba
A disturbing report released on December 2, 2025 on the malnutrition crisis among prisoners at the Maximum Security Prison of Boniato details how inmates are subjected to extermination-level conditions and measures that violate their right to life. The report focuses on this prison, considered one of the most brutal on the island. It is located in Santiago de Cuba Province in Eastern Cuba.
“This prison holds around 2,000 inmates, 90% of whom are malnourished due to the famine imposed by government authorities. The lack of food is so severe that the government has been forced to establish a classification system in three cell blocks: dystrophic grade 1, grade 2, and grade 3. These cell blocks house around 90 prisoners each. However, the critically skeletal dystrophic inmates number around 1,000—half the prison population. Grade 3 dystrophics are walking skeletons, slowly dying, with two or three deaths reported each week,” states the report from the Council of Human Rights Rapporteurs, led by blind attorney and prominent human rights defender Juan Carlos González Leiva from the city of Ciego de Ávila.
Dystrophic is defined as the progressive degeneration of cells/tissues due to faulty nutrition.
According to the report, 70 inmates at the Boniato prison died in 2024 from malnutrition and other related illnesses.
So far in 2025, another 80 deaths have occurred due to lack of food, medical care, and unsanitary conditions.
The classification system used by Boniato prison authorities allows for an extra spoonful of the prison’s poor-quality food to be given to dystrophic prisoners: “a sugarless herbal tea and a small piece of bread for breakfast; 3 or 4 spoonfuls of poorly cooked rice, a bit of broth without substance, and as a main course, one spoonful of colored wheat flour paste, repeated in the afternoon.”
“That’s why many prisoners survive only with what their families are able to bring them—families who themselves live in extreme economic hardship. But even this relief is often blocked by the authorities, who restrict both the amount and the type of food allowed,” the report adds.
Over the past two years, numerous reports of prisoner deaths in Boniato Prison—and under the control of its prison authorities—have come to light, demonstrating not only the responsibility of Havana but also confirming the systematic violation of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, which the Cuban State has signed.
The report further clarifies that this situation is not unique to Boniato Prison but is widespread across most Cuban prisons, due to the repressive and inhumane model being followed, and the lack of international inspections.
Democracies of the world and international human rights organizations need to denounce the horrific reality faced by both political and common prisoners in Cuba, and to demand that the Cuban government grant access to the International Committee of the Red Cross to enter Cuban prisons—access that has been denied since 1989.
Amnesty International released a report on how the Cuban government is “engaged in institutional gender-based violence against women human rights defenders, journalists, and activists”
Amnesty International on November 25, 2025 launched its new report “They Want Us Silent, But We Keep Resisting: Authoritarian Practices and State Violence Against Women in Cuba.”
Amnesty calls on “the Cuban authorities to end authoritarian practices and state gender-based violence against women human rights defenders. The report reveals that the Cuban state has implemented a systematic pattern of repression targeting women engaged in activism, journalism, and human rights defence. Such practices include arbitrary detention, unlawful surveillance, unjust criminalisation, enforced disappearance, and other forms of institutional violence — all within an environment marked by impunity for human rights violations and a lack of judicial safeguards.”
Please sign the petition calling on Havana to end the targeted repression of women human rights defenders
In response to these findings, Amnesty International on November 25, 2025 launched a global petition inviting people worldwide to urge President Miguel Díaz-Canel and the Cuban authorities to end the harassment and urgently adopt a comprehensive law on gender-based violence.
Cuban government, one of 12 in the World that voted against the return of Ukrainian children kidnapped in Vladimir Putin’s illegal war.
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