By IANS/EFE,
Havana : The unofficial Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation has said that four political prisoners were released from prison in January, but it added that “political repression continued increasing, in the form of arbitrary arrests for several hours or several days”.
“In the month of December 2009, we document at least 93 cases of people arrested and in the month of January 2010, we confirm at least 113 arrests for political reasons,” the Commission said in a report it released Thursday.
In January, “four political prisoners were released, three of them because they had served their sentences and one because of the suspension of a measure of pre-criminal social dangerousness”, on which he had been convicted, the report said.
The commission also said that “numerous abuses in the prison system were reported and one cannot notice the adoption of measures on the part of the government so that that situation might change under the rules set forth in the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners … of the UN.”
An earlier report by the commission said that it had documented at the beginning of this year that 201 political prisoners were being held on the communist-ruled island, seven less than at the beginning of 2009.
The freed prisoners who had fulfilled their sentences are Jose Benito Menendez, who served 16 years for armed infiltration; Rigoberto Zamora, two years for expressing disrespect for the head of state; and Ramon Velazquez, three years for pre-criminal social dangerousness.
Also released because of the suspension of the latter measure against him was Arquimedes Camacho, who served three of the four years of his sentence for “social dangerousness”, according to the dissident organisation.