Cuba’s government said it will release 51 people from its prisons in the “upcoming days,” in an announcement it described as an unexpected move tied to diplomacy with the Vatican. In a statement attributed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cuban officials said the releases would take place in coming days and were driven by “a spirit of goodwill and close relations with the Vatican.”
The government said it did not name the 51 people it plans to free, but it set out the criteria it will use. Officials said all of those selected “have served a significant part of their sentence and have maintained good conduct in prison.” It was not immediately known from the government statement whether any of the people included in the planned releases are political prisoners.
The announcement landed just hours before President Miguel Díaz-Canel is scheduled to speak early Friday, in another rare meeting with the press. The government said Díaz-Canel’s remarks are intended “to address national and international issues,” underscoring how the prisoner action is being presented as part of a wider public-facing moment.
Cuba has previously linked prisoner releases to Vatican-related negotiations. The AP report said that in January 2025, Cuba released prominent dissident José Daniel Ferrer as part of a government decision to gradually free more than 500 prisoners following talks with the Vatican. AP also reported that Ferrer left Cuba last October and is now in the United States, and that other early-2025 releases were part of the same Vatican-linked discussions.
The AP report said Cuba framed its latest step within a longer record of clemency. The government said it has granted pardons to 9,905 inmates since 2010 and said that in the past three years it released another 10,000 people sentenced to imprisonment. Even so, the statement did not specify how the new 51 fit into the government’s past categories of released prisoners or whether they include political detainees.
Independent rights monitoring has kept pressure on Cuba’s government to provide details about political incarceration. Prisoners Defenders said there were 1,214 political prisoners in Cuba as of February 2026, while the AP report said it was not immediately known whether any of the people to be released in the coming days are political prisoners.