Cruz’s Cuba claim is on target

The son of a Cuban immigrant, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that he hoped Presidentelect Donald Trump could press for change for Cubans following Fidel Castro’s death.

But in a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Cruz expressed some skepticism that anything will be better under Castro’s brother Raúl Castro, who began taking over in 2006.

“What the Obama administration has done is strengthen Raúl Castro. Raúl is the dictator now,” Cruz said. “You know, I asked my dad at dinner last night, what do you think happens now that Fidel is dead? And he shrugged and said Raúl has been in power for years. The system has gotten stronger . ... You know, in 2015 roughly 10,000 political arrests occurred in Cuba. That is five times as many as occurred in 2010, when there were only about 2,000.”

We were interested in his statistic, so we contacted Cruz’s office. Spokesman Phil Novack told us the senator slightly misspoke, but his point is still basically accurate.

Political arrests in Cuba

Novack told PolitiFact Florida that Cruz meant to compare the number of political arrests in Cuba in 2010 to 2016 rather than 2015.

Cruz’s primary source was the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. Based in Havana, the commission is the island’s oldest and most respected non-government, human-rights monitoring group, according to the Miami Herald, a PolitiFact Florida partner.

The commission reported 2,074 politically motivated detentions in 2010. That escalated

to 8,600 in 2015 and then to 9,125 through October 2016.

The commission predicts the number of political arrests “will exceed the level of 10,000 detentions” through the end of 2016.

Experts on Cuba say the commission founded by Elizardo Sánchez has the most reliable source of data and sometimes use it in combination with other sources.

That said, the data comes with caveats.

“It’s very hard to work with exact numbers in Cuba,” said Pedro Alcántara, spokesman for the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, based in Miami. “Not only are we fighting very strong repression, but sometimes the data changes every day.”

Some pro-regime groups criticize the list of the commission, alleging it contains multiple arrests of the same individuals within the same year.

Carlos Ponce, director of Latin America programs at the watchdog group Freedom Press, said he doesn’t know if that is true or not since it is impossible to audit the list.

“But at the same time, the list only covers the cases reported to Elizardo’s group, so you can say that there are many cases unreported,” he said.

There is some dispute about how to define political prisoners, raising questions of overcounting. In 2010, for example, The Associated Press vetted a list of 167 political prisoners by the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. About 50 people on the list “were convicted of terrorism, hijacking or other violent crimes, and four are former military or intelligence agents convicted of espionage or revealing state secrets,” according to the AP.

Why arrests increased

While settling on a precise figure of political arrests each year is a daunting task, experts agreed that in general the numbers have risen since 2010.

President Barack Obama’s announcement in 2014 that the United States would reopen ties with Cuba did not lead to less political repression on the island.

Sánchez, the creator of the commission’s list, told Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer in July that the civil and political rights situation had worsened over the past year.

More Cubans feel emboldened to express their discontent with the regime, even as the government sends more dissenters behind bars, said Marselha Gonçalves Margerin, advocacy director for the Americas at Amnesty International, a group that was last allowed into Cuba in 1989. Unless the criminal code is changed, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, the strengthened crackdown will continue, she said.

“We are seeing people going out on the streets that didn’t go before,” she told PolitiFact Florida.

Sebastian A. Arcos, associate director of the Cuban Research