Pilate's Pardons in Cuba

As the Cuban government announces the release of 3,500 prisoners ahead of Pope Francis I’s visit, human rights campaigners have likened it to the clemency shown by Pontius Pilate.

Thousands of people lined the route of Pope Francis's journey from the airport when he arrived  on September 19 at the start of a four-day visit. 

The announcement was made on September 1, and the large number of prisoners released reflects the current pope’s central role in negotiating a rapprochement between Havana and Washington, and the general warming in relations between the Roman Catholic Church and a once strongly anticlerical Communist leadership. 

Before the releases were announced, Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega y Alamino made a broad hint that it was going to happen, and that the Catholic Church had submitted a list of names.

Speaking on a TV show presented by singer-songwriter Amaury Pérez Vidal, the cardinal recalled that despite a “long, sometimes difficult and adversorial” relationship with the communist authorities, the church had successfully lobbied for prison releases on previous occasions.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi welcomed the mass pardon as a “positive sign.”

It was all the more surprising, then, that the list of 3,522 names did not contain any known political prisoners. The Communist Party newspaper said eligibility were minors, convicts aged 60-plus, the sick, and foreign nationals, but not anyone convicted of “crimes against state security”.

When Pope John Paul II visited in 1998, 300 were released, while just under 3,000 were freed ahead of Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival in 2012. In both cases, political prisoners were included.

“The Cuban government has responded to the Pope’s visit like Pontius Pilate, who set Barabbas free instead of releasing Jesus,” Reynaldo Escobar, editor-in-chief of the digital newspaper 14Ymedio, which is censored in Cuba, told IWPR.

According to José Daniel Ferrer of the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU), a dissident group, “Not one of UNPACU’s 21 political prisoners has been pardoned.”

Antonio Rodiles of the Forum for Rights and Freedoms in Cuba argues that the system headed by Fidel Castro and now his brother Raúl is fundamentally resistant to change.

“‘Castrismo’ is showing its tough stance. It doesn’t want to pardon political prisoners, and it doesn’t want to give in to the opposition’s demands,” he explained.

“We celebrate the detainees’ freedom, but the government… continues to hold a group of dissidents under arrest,” said Berta Soler, leader of the Damas de Blanco group. “We requested a private interview with Pope Francis, but the Holy Father did not respond.”

Damas de Blanco (“Ladies in White”) is a pacifist group set up by women campaigning for the release of 75 relatives imprisoned during what became known as the “Black Spring” of 2003. All the original 75 detainees have been released, but the group continues to campaign for human rights.

Eleven of the “Black Spring” prisoners are free but still on parole, and can thus be sent back to jail whenever the authorities decide. The mass pardon does not affect them.

“We have been left baffled, with a profound feeling of frustration and powerlessness,” said one of the 11, Ivan Hernández Carrillo. “Not for ourselves but for the political prisoners who are still behind bars and subject to all kinds of abuse and harassment.”

“Ultimately, they haven’t reformed the penal code….No pronouncements have been made on finally pardoning any of us,” said writer Jorge Olivera Castillo, who is on parole because of illness.

He dismisses the pardons as “headline-grabbers”.

Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said his organisation gave Cardinal Ortega a list of political prisoners who should be included in the pardon, but that this was ignored. The Forum for Rights and Freedoms handed the Council of Catholic Bishops in Cuba a similar list, but that too went unheeded.

“I think they’ve closed their eyes,” Sánchez said.

The Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, based in Spain, said  Pope Francis’s visit came after the worst month this year in terms of political detentions. So far in 2015, it said, 4,238 politically-motivated detentions had taken place, with the highest figure in August.

Ernesto García Díaz is a journalist for the digital news portal Cubanet News. He is currently on an internship with IWPR.