Capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

is a legal penalty in

Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribbea ...

, however it is seldom used. The last executions were in 2003. National legislation provides for death penalty for murder, threatening to commit murder, aggravated

rape Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or ...

terrorism Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...

, hijacking, piracy, drug trafficking and manufacturing,

espionage Espionage, spying, or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangib ...

, and

treason Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...

. The typical method is

execution by firing squad Execution by firing squad, in the past sometimes called fusillading (from the French ''fusil'', rifle), is a method of capital punishment, particularly common in the military and in times of war. Some reasons for its use are that firearms are u ...

Overview

The

1940 Constitution of Cuba The 1940 Constitution of Cuba was implemented during the presidency of Federico Laredo Brú and took effect on 10 October 1940. It was primarily influenced by the collectivist ideas that inspired the Cuban Revolution of 1933. Widely considered on ...

banned capital punishment for peacetime offenses, but the penalty was officially reinstated by law as well as in practice following the

Cuban Revolution The Cuban Revolution ( es, Revolución Cubana) was carried out after the 1952 Cuban coup d'état which placed Fulgencio Batista as head of state and the failed mass strike in opposition that followed. After failing to contest Batista in co ...

, in 1959. Some sources suggest that as many as 49,000 individuals were shot by firing squad in Cuba after 1959. Other sources report that these numbers may be considerably higher, incorporating a very large number of extra-judicial executions. The last death sentences were officially commuted in December 2010. The last recorded executions were on April 11, 2003, The case concerned three men who were found guilty of having hijacked a

Regla Regla () is one of the 15 municipalities or boroughs (''municipios'' in Spanish) in the city of Havana, Cuba. It comprises the town of Regla, located at the bottom of Havana Bay in a former aborigine settlement named ''Guaicanamar'', Loma Model ...

ferry. The hijack occurred on April 4, 2003; during the incident, the plaintiffs were alleged to have threatened to kill passengers, demanding sufficient fuel to travel to the United States. In 2010, the sentences of all remaining death row inmates in Cuba were commuted. The last person to have their death sentence commuted was Humberto Eladio Real, who killed a man during an attempted insurgency raid in 1994. His sentence was reduced to 30 years in prison in December 2010. To date, no further death sentences have been handed out.

References

Murder in Cuba Law of Cuba Human rights abuses in Cuba {{LatAm-law-stub

Overview

See also

References