Sánchez, the leader of the CCDHRN, said his statement was based on the testimony of family members and even some inmates who telephoned the organisation from jail.

The prison regime is austere, but the prisoners are allowed visits every four months, he acknowledged.

Cuban President Raúl Castro announced in late April that a group of convicts facing the death penalty, some of whom have been waiting for years for a pronouncement by the Council of State, will now serve life sentences or 30-year terms instead.

Sánchez said this decision was “positive,” although he deplored the lack of “public information” about how many prisoners would benefit from the measure, and how many would serve 30 years or be behind bars for life.

“Our Commission had to make inferences to estimate that between 20 and 30 people sentenced to capital punishment had their sentences commuted, and about half of these will serve life sentences,” says the CCDHRN report signed by Sánchez, where he is described as a “human rights observer and former prisoner of conscience.”

The statement, distributed to foreign correspondents in Havana, says it is “disturbing” that prisoners who had their death penalties commuted are still being held under extremely harsh conditions, pointing out that some have been in isolation for more than 10 years.

The government’s handling of the death penalty issue remains “very conservative,” and there are still dozens of crimes to which capital punishment still applies. “It’s a sword of Damocles hanging over Cubans,” Sánchez said.

Nevertheless, the decision to commute the death penalty reaffirmed the de facto moratorium on capital punishment that has been in force in this country since 2003, after three men who hijacked a passenger ferry were executed by firing squad.

Since then no death sentences have been handed down by the courts and no new executions have been carried out.

The Cuban government argues in favour of keeping the death penalty on the books as a legal weapon to defend the country from foreign aggression and from possible domestic attempts to undermine the state, as well as to protect the population from the most heinous crimes.

In line with this argument, Havana links the possible abolition of the death penalty to a cessation of the U.S. policy of “hostility and terrorism” and the four-decade U.S. economic embargo, according to official documents like a 2004 letter from Cuba to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“We have been forced to choose, in legitimate defence, the route of establishing and enforcing severe laws against our enemies, but always strictly within the framework of the law and with respect for legal guarantees,” Castro said in April at the closing session of a plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee.

The Commission’s report indicates that between January and July this year, the CCDHRN documented 219 cases of political prisoners, 15 fewer than the 234 it identified in 2007. But the real figure could be higher, due to the hermetic nature of the regime which does not permit “any kind of scrutiny,” the dissident group says.

The authorities do not generally reply to the organisation’s reports, nor do they provide any statistics on the prison population.

But Sánchez declared that “short-term” detentions have increased, and the CCDHRN has also documented mistreatment at the hands of the police, something he said had been avoided in the past.

The document names 219 people who are serving prison sentences or are awaiting trial, and also mentions 67 “Cuban prisoners of conscience adopted by Amnesty International who are still serving their sentences.” Ten of these are under house arrest, rather than in prison, for health reasons.

The list includes three persons sentenced to death whose appeals to the Supreme Court will be analysed soon, Castro said in his April speech. Two are Salvadorans, Raúl Ernesto Cruz and Otto René Rodríguez, who were convicted of terrorism in 1998 after taking part in a series of bombings of tourist facilities in Cuba, one of which resulted in the death of an Italian businessman.

The third is Humberto Eladio Real, a Cuban arrested on Oct. 15, 1994 after disembarking on the island, committing a murder and stealing his victim’s car. He was tried and convicted of murder and acts against the security of the state. (END/2008)