Cuba's prisoner release: A gesture or real reform? Photo credit: Chris Goldberg www.flickr.com/photos/chrisgold/

With the upcoming visit of the Spanish foreign minister, Cuba is planning on releasing 52 political prisoners. Positive step or smoke screen?

The Roman Catholic Church came to an agreement with the Cuban government to release 52 political prisoners, during a visit from the Spanish foreign minister on Thursday. The prisoners, according to Reuters, are expected to be released over the next four to five months. The news has been received with cautious welcome by the international community: Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, who had travelled to Cuba to participate in the church-state talks, claimed that the release could lead to better relations between the communist country and the European Union, while US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed the decision on Thursday, calling it “overdue”, but a “very welcome” “positive sign”.

The move comes during a period of financial crisis for Cuba, which is struggling with a very sluggish and isolated economy, in part due to America’s embargo on it. Last year saw President Barack Obama easing some restrictions on Cuba, including on cash remittances from Cuban Americans back to Cuba, but the President also claimed that he could go no further unless Cuba’s government responded positively.

Now, some observers claim, it has. Writing in The Guardian on Friday, Stephen Wilkinson, director of the Centre for Caribbean and Latin American Research and Consultancy at London Metropolitan University, claimed the news as a “very positive step” – principally because it “puts the ball back in the Obama administration’s court”. Wrote Wilkinson, “It is now up to Washington to make the next step if the idiotic Cuban embargo is to end.” Wilkinson put the agreement down to the guidance of Raul Castro and opined that it “shows that talking to Havana constructively does bring results”.

But other observers aren’t so convinced by Cuba’s show of concern for human rights. Terence Blacker, writing in The Independent, urged the international community to discard the “sentimentalism” which it views the country. “Amid hopes that Cuba will enter a new age, retaining its proud independence but not at the cost of freedom of expression, there are starker lessons to be learned nearer to home,” he wrote. “Democracy and free speech are more fragile, more vulnerable to attack, than we like to think. With the right sentimental baggage, a dangerous moral relativism comes into play. Even for good-hearted, liberal-minded folk, there are some circumstances when the brutal suppression of dissidence is just fine.”

And neither The Independent nor The Washington Post were convinced that Cuba’s gesture was anything more than that. In its leading editorial today, The Independent shamed the international community for exhibiting a “degree of moral blindness concerning the regime’s abysmal human rights record”, though it took pains to evince its disapproval of America’s “blockade” of the island and its “coercive tactics” against Havana. The Washington Post, in its leading editorial, took pains to clarify the US’s de facto position on Cuba, which it claims is considerably more lenient, especially in that America is Cuba’s fifth-largest trading partner. The paper also noted that this prisoner release fits the Castro regime’s pattern “of buying time for the regime rather than reforming it”.

Al Jazeera‘s report on Cuba’s planned prisoner release: