Cuba closed July 2026 with 1,327 political prisoners, the highest number ever documented by the organization Prisoners Defenders (PD), which recorded 36 new additions to its list during the month, 15 of which were directly linked to citizen protests.
The case that has garnered the most outrage is that of Alex Javier Hernández González, a 13-year-old boy who was arrested on July 22 without an arrest warrant in Santiago de las Vegas, Boyeros, Havana, following the protests against power outages.
According to his mother’s report, four uniformed police officers beat the teenager on the head, neck, and back while he pleaded, "Don't hit me anymore, I'm just a kid."
The agents also prevented the medical certificate for the injuries from being prepared, claiming that a signature was missing, and they attempted to attribute the injuries to the protesters themselves, a version that the minor refuted by directly pointing out the uniformed officers as responsible.
Alex Javier remains confined in "El Combinadito," a juvenile detention center operated by the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) in Guanabacoa, with the charges against him yet to be disclosed.
The repression in July intensified around the fifth anniversary of the protests on July 11, 2021, and did not ease after that date; instead, it deepened, with detentions that affected protesters, artists, journalists, digital activists, and even those who expressed acts of solidarity with prisoners.
Two independent musicians, Pedro Ernesto Farías («El Feno») and Rolando Almenteros («El Bohemio»), were violently arrested on July 7 in the Santos Suárez neighborhood for recording a protest video against power outages; Rolando was beaten during the arrest and remains incommunicado at the El Vivac detention center.
On the same day, the activist Lumey Guzmán from Alamar was arrested after responding to a summons from State Security; PD believes that her initial concealment constitutes a short-term enforced disappearance, a pattern that the United Nations has documented in Cuba.
Repression reached the extreme of imprisoning Aniley Martínez Ramírez for bringing food to the political prisoner Lizandra Góngora Espinosa, who is serving a 14-year sentence in the Isle of Youth, suffers from sickle cell anemia, and was in solitary confinement in July.
Of the 1,327 documented prisoners, 459 suffer from severe medical conditions, 150 are women, and 41 were detained while underage; in the last 12 months, the list has added 275 new cases, averaging 23 per month.
The regime also confirmed sentences against individuals who had previously been acquitted: Ana Ibis Tristá Padilla must serve 14 years in prison and Jarol Varona Agüero, 13 years, despite both having been declared innocent due to lack of evidence in an initial trial; the Supreme People's Court upheld the sentences relying solely on testimonies from Counterintelligence officers.
From prison, Ana Ibis reached out to PD to declare her innocence and to assert that the judges who acquitted her faced pressure from State Security: "We are not dead, and even less so silent," she said.
Direct repression is complemented by the systematic use of forced expatriation: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was deported to the United States on July 18, nine days after fully serving his five-year sentence, without being allowed to stay in Cuba; Maykel Osorbo was abruptly transferred to the maximum-security prison in Guanajay and remained missing for almost 48 hours, while the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recommended overturning his nine-year sentence.
From August 2021 to the end of July 2026, the Cuban regime has accumulated 2,148 political prisoners in just five years, according to documentation from Prisoners Defenders.
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