The Penal Code presently in force provides for the...

The Penal Code presently in force provides for the death penalty for 112 offenses, 33 of which are common crimes. Death-qualifiable offenses include: crimes against external State security; crimes against internal State security; crimes against peace and international law; acts against State security (like the violation of Cuban territory by participating as a member of the crew or traveling on board a ship or plane); crimes against the normal development of sexual relations and against the family, infancy and youth (rape when the victim is under 12 years of age or serious injury or illness results; pederasty with violence when the victim is under 14 years of age or serious injury or illness results).Under the Cuban Criminal Code, minors under 20 and women are exempt from capital punishment.The death penalty has been used in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, after which Castro's triumphant revolutionary forces tried and executed scores of supporters of former dictator Fulgencio Batista. The death penalty was common in the 1960s and 1970s, but has been rare in the past two decades. In more recent years, the death penalty, carried out by firing squad, has been reserved for cases like terrorism, armed rebellion or particularly gruesome killings or serial murders. The most high-profile recent executions in Cuba were in 1992, when 2 local men were sent to the firing squad for killing 4 policemen in an unsuccessful bid to escape from the island at Tarara, just east of Havana. Also that year, a Cuban exile from the United States, Eduardo Diaz Betancourt, was executed after being convicted of planning sabotage and terrorist attacks on the island. In perhaps the most famous execution case in Cuba, a former revolutionary hero and general, Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez, and 3 other military officers were killed by firing squad in 1989 after a military tribunal convicted them on drug and corruption charges.A February 1999 reform of the penal code adopted the life sentence and expanded the application of the death penalty to crimes of drug trafficking with aggravating circumstances, violent assault and corruption of minors. Under Cuban law, people under 20 and pregnant women cannot be sentenced to death. According to official sources, no woman has been sentenced to death since Pres. Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.