The former Cuban political prisoner Alejandro González Raga issued a warning filled with irony towards the regime officials responsible for crimes and repression: they must be judged "by their own law," the same one that still includes the death penalty.
The statement arose during an interview with journalist Tania Costa, in which González Raga —executive director of the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights (OCDH)— discussed the issue of accountability in a post-dictatorship Cuba.
The former prisoner was careful to draw a distinction: not all Cubans who participated in the regime's structures deserve the same treatment.
"It can't be generalized either. Those of us who are Cuban know that many people have played the game, engaged in double standards, and all that to have a better life," he pointed out.
But that understanding has a clear limit. "Those who have participated in acts of bloodshed, those who have violated the law, those who have contributed, those who have resorted to violence—those individuals must be judged by the law. And I would say by their own law. According to their own law, there is still the death penalty. By their own law," González Raga asserted, leaving the statement hanging in the air with deliberate intent.
"Let's leave it there. Let's leave it there since we've left it on a high note," suggested the journalist, turning the silence into an implicit warning.
The argument has a solid legal foundation. The Cuban Penal Code effective since December 2022 maintains the death penalty for 23 extremely serious criminal offenses, including crimes against state security, terrorism, murder, and international drug trafficking. The execution is carried out by firing squad.
According to the Supreme People's Court, the last official execution in Cuba occurred in 2003, and pending sentences were commuted in 2008. However, the legal existence of the death penalty remains, according to human rights organizations, a tool of political intimidation.
González Raga has firsthand knowledge of the Cuban penal system. He was one of the 75 opponents imprisoned during the Black Spring of 2003, when Fidel Castro's regime arrested independent journalists, activists, and human rights defenders within hours in summary trials.
Sentenced to 14 years in prison for his work as an independent journalist and his involvement in the Christian Liberation Movement and the Varela Project, he served five years in Cuban prisons before being released and exiled to Spain in February 2008, as part of an agreement between both governments. Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience.
From exile, González Raga has continued to document the repression on the island as the executive director of the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights, an organization founded in Madrid on December 10, 2010, primarily composed of former political prisoners and members of the Ladies in White.
After the segment on justice, the conversation shifted to a personal project: González Raga revealed that he is working on a comic about his prison experience with the help of artificial intelligence. "It's a comic that I'm making. You know that now artificial intelligence makes things much easier," he explained, describing the project as a hobby.
The new Cuban Penal Code was also denounced by the OCDH for criminalizing the exercise of fundamental freedoms, and Amnesty International described it as "a terrifying landscape" for human rights on the island.
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