Between April and the beginning of May 2026, the Cubalex Monitoring team has received 20 complaints related to the revocation or denial of benefits to people deprived of their liberty on the island. Of that total, 19 refer to specific inmates and one report concerns the general denial of benefits at the Veguita prison in Yara, Granma. A case was also recorded of forced exile in exchange for the freedom of political prisoner Sissi Abascal.
For Cubalex, there is a direct and unequivocal connection between cases of denial of passes to less severe regimes, the arbitrary revocation of extra-penal licenses and the imposition of forced exile. These mechanisms do not operate in isolation, but rather as a coercive continuum in which the Cuban state manipulates access to prison benefits—rights formally recognized by the Law on Criminal Enforcement (Law 152/2022) and Decree-Law 74/2023—to condition the freedom of dissidents. Those activists who persist in their work of denunciation inside or outside prisons suffer the summary revocation of their non-custodial measures or the definitive blocking of their progression to less severe regimes. Conversely, Those identified by the regime as high-profile opinion leaders are denied any internal benefits and they are legally suffocated with the sole purpose of forcing their definitive departure from the national territory, configuring a pattern of systematic exile.
The distribution and nature of this statistical data demonstrate a tactical correlation within the state security apparatus. The specific complaints represent the surgical application of sanctions, punitive transfers, and revocations of benefits against targets previously selected and monitored by independent civil society, such as communicators, journalists, and human rights defenders. Through these individualized actions, the regime seeks to neutralize the capacity of legal support networks to organize and denounce these practices.
The second component of the Cuban state's strategy consists of the "revolving door," a penal intermittency device that It allows for the summary revocation of non-custodial measures or extra-penal licenses of a humanitarian nature. This tactic creates a false appearance of judicial flexibility before the international community, while keeping activists in a legal and psychological limbo where any critical expression triggers immediate re-imprisonment. To avoid the political cost of arrests motivated by explicit ideological reasons, the Cuban prosecutor's office often reclassifies these cases into serious common criminal offenses, such as... possession of weapons or sabotage, with the aim of covering up political persecution.
Cases of Ángel Cuza, Yanet Pérez Quevedo and Yoan de la Cruz
Other cases that The cases that caught Cubalex's attention are those of three former political prisoners who had been released and returned to prison. These are Ángel Cuza and Yoan de la Cruz, who are being prosecuted for alleged new crimes, and Yanet Pérez Quevedo, after her leave of absence due to pregnancy and maternity expired. A fourth worrying case is that of political prisoner Yasmany Valdés González, who It was returned to the Combinado del Este after spending a few days in the minimum severity regime and receiving a pass to his home.
Pérez Quevedo, mother of seven children - most of them minors -, She was arrested She was arrested on April 30th and remained missing for several hours. It was later learned that she had been transferred to the El Guatao women's prison in Havana because her maternity leave had expired. Furthermore, her daughters, Lía and Selet, aged 10 and 15 months respectively, were taken to a children's home in San José de las Lajas, Mayabeque, on the same day as her arrest.
For his part, activist Ángel Cuza was also violently detained on April 30 in the Miramar neighborhood of Havana, while he was with his 15-year-old daughter. A car arrived Geely It was gray, and he took it away. On May 5th they handed it to him Cuza's family was given an informal note with some details about the case so they could hire a lawyer. This was under the pretext that he would be prosecuted again for the crime of illegal possession of weapons and explosives. The opposition leader had already served several months in jail after a disused bullet was found among his belongings, which he kept as a talisman.
In the following days, the former political prisoner, who had been released from prison in January 2026, He has remained in the prisons of Vivac, Valle Grande and currently at the Combinado del Este.
Finally, the most recent case of this type is that of Yoan de la Cruz, a former political prisoner from the 11J massacre, arrested on May 9 at his home in San Antonio de los Baños, Artemisa. Authorities searched the residence and confiscated several of the young man's belongings. The little information Regarding his arrest, it is indicated that authorities intend to charge him with involvement in an alleged act of sabotage planned for the municipality. He remains in custody at the Guanajay Technical Prison. De la Cruz, sentenced to five years in prison for filming the popular protests of July 2021, had been on parole since 2022. He is reportedly facing a new charge for the alleged crime of sabotage.
Forced exile as a requirement for freedom
The dynamics of revocations and the systematic blocking of passes and paroles acquire a structural meaning when contrasted with the state policy of forced exile or banishment. For the Cuban regime, the right to early release and the progression of sentences are not based on re-education criteria, but rather function as an exclusive monopoly of the repressive apparatus used to force high-profile dissidents to choose between indefinite confinement in inhumane prison conditions or permanent exile from the country.
He case of Sissi Abascal Zamora, 28 years old and one of the youngest members of the opposition group Ladies in White, The report documents the dynamics of family blackmail implemented by State Security. Abascal was serving a 6-year prison sentence in La Bellotex prison, in Matanzas, for the alleged crimes of public disorder, contempt, and assault after participating in the July 11 protests. During his years of imprisonment, the authorities repeatedly denied him any benefit of release or progression to a less restrictive regime due to his stance against the regime.
The selective punishment against her was evident in her systematic exclusion from the mass release processes coordinated with the Vatican, both from the list of 553 released on January 14, 2025, and from the process in March 2026. Instead of granting her passes or the parole she was entitled to, State Security officials offered her the option of exile in October 2025, taking advantage of the severe deterioration of her health after undergoing surgery for Bartholinitis and being confined in unsanitary conditions.
The repressive apparatus strictly conditioned her release from prison on her mother, Annia Zamora—also a Lady in White—agreeing to leave Cuba first. Zamora was forced to consent to the exile to enable her daughter's release and access to medical care. Her final departure for the United States was finalized on May 15, 2026, through the facilitation of a humanitarian visa. The forced exile caused a painful family rift, as her father, the opposition leader Armando Abascal, had to remain in Cuba along with another of his children, reflecting the emotional trauma of conditional exile, where the recovery of physical freedom is paid for with the permanent loss of homeland and identity. disintegration of the family nucleus.
Legal conclusions and implications for international action
The cross-analysis and systematic review of cases under Cubalex's monitoring and advisory services during April and May 2026 supports the following conclusions and recommendations:
- Judicial Instrumentalization as a Transactional DevicePartial and conditional releases in Cuba do not constitute genuine gestures of clemency or judicial reform. The Cuban regime uses the penal system as a captive market of hostages, whose release is piecemeal or reversed at its discretion to respond to external military pressure, incentivize economic concessions from democratic governments, or repress new cycles of civil unrest.
- Absolute Incompatibility with Transitional Justice and Positive PeaceThe persistence of the Interior Ministry's punitive structures and the subordination of the public prosecutor's office to the party apparatus negate the viability of a process of internal democratic pacification in Cuba. Prisoner exchanges and conditional releases carried out without reparations for victims, without automatically expunging criminal records, and without offering guarantees of non-repetition, fit the doctrinal concept of "negative peace," perpetuating structural injustice and externally legitimizing dictatorial repression.
- Recommendation for the Urgent Activation of Precautionary Measures before the IACHRIt is imperative that independent, inter-American civil society request the urgent adoption of precautionary protective measures in favor of Dixán Gaínza Moré, Yoandrys Gutiérrez Vargas, Ángel Cuza Alfonso, and Yanet Pérez Quevedo. These requests must be based on the imminent risk to Gaínza Moré's life due to the denial of treatment for recurrent hypertensive crises, the extreme physical emaciation of Gutiérrez Vargas, and the systematic fabrication of common criminal evidence against Cuza Alfonso, which perpetuates physical and institutional abuse against dissent.
- Activation of Requests before the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: To file formal complaints to classify the detention of Combinado del Este (Cuza Alfonso), Guanajay (Otero Alcántara), Boniato (Gutiérrez Vargas) and Kilo 8 (Gaínza Moré) as arbitrary detentions under Category II (violation of the right to expression) and Category V (discrimination on the grounds of political opinion), forcing the Cuban State to respond to the United Nations treaty bodies regarding the fraudulent manipulation of disciplinary and procedural incidents in the sentence execution phase.