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Cubalex reports guns handed to prison officials in exchange for sentence benefits
A report by the organisation argues the exchange has operated for more than three decades in Cuban prisons and rests on testimony covering 13 prisons and camps in six provinces, according to Infobae.
Cubalex gathered testimony about alleged arrangements in which inmates and their relatives hand firearms to officials in order to obtain reduced sentences, transfers or changes of prison regime, a practice the report traces across more than three decades, according to Infobae. The mechanism described has relatives obtaining the weapons on the illegal market and handing them over, expecting the prisoner to receive a benefit they would not be entitled to given their time served or the rules in force.
The investigation drew on statements from eight former prisoners, one relative and a former prison re-educator, and the accounts cover 13 prisons and forced labour camps spread across six provinces. The organisation itself makes clear that the material gathered does not allow it to establish how many inmates have obtained such arrangements: it presents the testimony as a pattern sustained over time, not as a measurement.
The report cites the case of 12 ordinary prisoners with long sentences who are said to have moved from the maximum security prison of Boniato, in Santiago de Cuba, to lower-severity camps; an internal source gave the organisation their names in December 2024. According to the report, those arrangements were made with Lieutenant Colonel Graisel La Rosa González, then head of the Technical Investigation Department at that prison. This is an allegation recorded in testimony, not a judicially proven fact, and the report does not present it as a national measurement.
The statements gathered attribute involvement in or knowledge of the process to the Directorate of Penitentiary Establishments, to the Technical Investigation Department, later renamed the Technical Investigation Police, and in certain cases to prosecutors. According to those interviewed, the information circulates through inmates who cooperate with officials, known as «disciplinas», and through agents said to pose as prisoners in order to identify people who might know of weapons outside the prisons.
The jurist and former political prisoner Julio Ferrer Tamayo placed the start of the practice between late 1992 and early 1993 and linked it to the theft of a container of Makarov pistols in Havana, service weapons of the Interior Ministry and the Revolutionary Armed Forces which, according to the report, later circulated on the informal market. Eliober Sosa, a former re-educator at centres in Granma between 1992 and 1999, put the emergence of these procedures around 1993 and 1994: «What they care about is the weapon», he said of the criterion that, according to his testimony, guided the granting of certain benefits.
Progression to a less severe regime, reduced sentences, parole, extra-penal licence and transfers are benefits set out in Cuban prison rules, tied by law to time served, conduct and other conditions. The report argues that in the arrangements alleged those requirements could be set aside in favour of handing over a weapon, and that some relatives describe the denial of benefits as a form of pressure. One relative interviewed anonymously said the arrangements are not always honoured and that their clandestine nature makes any formal complaint impossible.
Sources: Infobae
Data updated: 2026-11-10T04:15:00.000Z