Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel attends the 17th annual BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, July 6, 2025.
Eraldo Pérez/AP
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Eraldo Pérez/AP
HAVANA – Cuba’s government said Thursday night it would release 51 people from the island’s prisons in an unexpected move.
The Foreign Ministry said the release in the coming days is due to a spirit of goodwill and close relations with the Vatican.
The government did not identify who it would release, except to say that “all have served a significant portion of their sentence and have maintained good behavior in prison.”
The announcement was made a few hours before Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke early Friday in another rare meeting with the press “to address national and international issues.”
The government said it had granted pardons to 9,905 inmates since 2010. It added that in the past three years, another 10,000 people sentenced to prison had been released.
In January 2025, Cuba released prominent dissident José Daniel Ferrer as part of a government decision to gradually release more than 500 prisoners following talks with the Vatican.
Ferrer left Cuba last October and is now in the United States.
He was one of several prisoners released in early 2025 as part of talks with the Vatican. The releases began a day after President Joe Biden’s administration announced its intention to lift the US designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism.
It was not immediately known if any of the people the government plans to free are political prisoners.
The nonprofit Prisoners Defenders has said there were 1,214 political prisoners in Cuba as of February 2026.