A pro-human rights group, the outlawed Cuban Commission...

A pro-human rights group, the outlawed Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHyRN), asked for a moratorium on the death penalty to be implemented in Cuba, the commutation of sentences already handed down and the banning of the death penalty in the future. The CCDHyRN also asked the Cuban government to accept the cooperation of the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] in order to improve the living conditions of the prisoners who live on"death row".
In a communique sent to the foreign media in Havana - signed by CCDHyRN President Elizardo Sanchez and by Carlos J. Menendez of the so-called "Programme Against the Death Penalty" - the CCDHyRN praised the fact that "no new executions by firing squad have been confirmed" since early April 2003. On 10 April 2003 the death penalty was carried out on Barbaro Sevilla, Lorenzo Copello and Jorge Luis Martinez who, using firearms, hijacked a passenger boat with the aim of migrating to the United States.
Notwithstanding, the Commission fears that Cuba, where the penal code prescribes the death penalty for 60 offences, may resume sentencing or shooting people to death as a method of repression.
According to the CCDHyRN statement, there are currently between 40 and 50 persons in Cuba who have already received or could receive the death penalty. These people are kept in 10 of the country's 50 high-security prisons. Based on reports from relatives or direct from the prisons themselves, the group denounced that: "Prisoners exposed to the death penalty in Cuba are kept in jails under truly subhuman conditions."
The statement included a list of 35 of the people who are sentenced to death and the jails in which they are confined.
Since the revolution led by current president Fidel Castro in 1959, between 5,000 and 6,000 people have been put to death on the island, mainly for political crimes or crimes against the state, the Commission said.
The CCDHyRN said there were no official records of these executions, and sources for such information were mainly in exile as 90% of the families of executed people had left Cuba.
The approximate total compiled by the Cuban group tallies with that of a Cuban academic resident in Washington, Armando Lago, a Standford Research Institute consultant, who says 5,621 people were put to death since the start of the revolution in Cuba.