Washington.– U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanded this Saturday the immediate release of Cuban political prisoners as the fifth anniversary of the July 11, 2021 protests, known as 11J, is commemorated; these were the largest citizen mobilizations recorded on the island since the 1959 Revolution.
Rubio recalled that hundreds of Cubans “remain unjustly detained” for demanding basic freedoms and questioned the conditions in which those who remain deprived of liberty for political reasons find themselves.
“To this day, hundreds of Cubans remain unjustly detained, subjected to brutal conditions, for the simple fact of asking why Cubans cannot freely own businesses, participate in the political process, or provide for themselves and their families,” Rubio wrote on his X account. “The regime must release these political prisoners immediately,” the official added.
The figures support the gravity of the situation. The human rights organization Prisoners Defenders, based in Madrid, documented 1,306 political prisoners in Cuba at the end of June, a figure considered a historical record in its logs. Of that total, 40 were detained when they were minors, also the highest number recorded to date. In June alone, 32 new cases were verified.
“The Cuban regime has just set two sinister new records of repression on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 11J,” stated Javier Larrondo, president of the organization, in statements to Infobae.
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In his message, Rubio noted that this Saturday marks five years since “the Cuban communist regime brutally stifled the peaceful demonstrations of July 11 and once again silenced the demands of Cubans for basic rights, dignity, and opportunity.”
The Secretary of State indicated that both he and President Donald Trump aspire to “a better future for Cuba, in which Cubans have greater opportunity, freedom, and dignity, and Cuba ceases to harbor hostile foreign military, intelligence, terrorism, and subversion operations 90 miles (145 kilometers) from U.S. territory.”
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Rubio stated that Washington will continue to use “all the tools at its disposal to push for meaningful economic and political reforms in Cuba and to protect Americans from the subversive threats emanating from Cuba”.
Five years after thousands of Cubans took to the streets to demand food, medicine, and freedoms, the situation on the island has not only failed to improve, but has worsened. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) projects that the Cuban economy will contract by 6.5% in 2026, while the Economist Intelligence Unit estimates a 7.2% decline.
The deterioration of the electrical system, exacerbated after the reduction of Venezuelan crude shipments following the capture of Nicolás Maduro last January, deepened a crisis that analysts point out has roots much older than Washington’s sanctions.
“Cuba’s economic decline began long before the latest U.S. sanctions,” noted Jason Marczak, director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, in statements to the EFE agency.
“Decades of economic mismanagement and corruption by the Cuban regime have hollowed out the island’s productive sector,” added Marczak, whose center published a recent report analyzing the causes of the economic deterioration prior to the tightening of Washington’s measures.
For his part, economist Ricardo Torres, a researcher at American University, identified three structural decisions that explain the economic collapse: a poor investment policy that prioritized hotel construction over electrical infrastructure and agriculture; a “persistently inconsistent, fragmented, and restrictive approach toward the private sector”; and the 2021 monetary unification, which abruptly devalued the peso and generated inflation that “eroded real wages and savings” and “exacerbated, rather than resolved, the imbalances it intended to correct,” he explained to EFE.
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Repression, according to human rights organizations, has not diminished over the years. According to Prisoners Defenders, between July 2025 and June 2026, 264 new political prisoners were added in Cuba, for an average of 22 cases per month.
