Madrid/Cuba accumulates 217 requests for urgent actions before the United Nations Committee against Forced Disappearances from 2012 to August 31, 2026. This is the fourth highest number among the countries included in the agency report published on September 30. Only Mexicowith 877; Iraq, with 670, and Colombia, with 255, are ahead.
In the first eight months of this year, the Island registered 17 applications, the second most after Mexico, which added 73. Ecuador appears next, with 11. The document, titled Report on requests for urgent action submitted under article 30 of the Conventioncounts in total actions corresponding to 36 countries, 11 of them from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances allows, in the aforementioned article 30, to request urgent action from the Committee to search for and locate a missing person.
The 17 cases of 2026 include the five occupants of the boat from Florida intercepted last February, later accused of terrorism
The Committee does not identify the 17 Cubans by name, but describes four groups of cases. There are five occupants of the boat from Florida intercepted last Februarylater accused of terrorism. “Although the authorities reported that they had survived the interception, they allegedly did not provide their relatives with precise information about their whereabouts and physical condition after the deprivation of liberty,” the document indicates.
He case had been brought before the Committee by Cubalexwho presented the applications on behalf of Conrado Galindo Sariol, Cristian Ernesto Acosta Guevara, Leordán Enrique Cruz Gómez, Amijail Sánchez González and José Manuel Rodríguez Castelló.
Another 11 cases date back to June. One corresponds to a man who went to a Havana police station after receiving a summons and was later transported in a police vehicle. That description coincides with the arrest of the rapper Andrés Matos Alcántara, Mc K-Libre. Cubalex presented to the Committee both the request for its case and the ten urgent actions corresponding to the arrested during subsequent operations to the fire of the Orlando Pantoja Tamayo Memorial House, in Maffo, Santiago de Cuba; four of them were minors.
The last Cuban case described by the United Nations Committee against Forced Disappearances in its report is that of a person who had been serving a sentence since 2021 and was transferred in July from the Guanajay prison to an unknown location shortly before the scheduled date to end his sentence. The person is easily recognizable: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántarataken from that prison on July 7 and whose whereabouts were unknown before being deported to Miami on July 18. Cubalex had also presented to the Committee the request for urgent action in its case.
Cuba has not yet “provided any information on the measures adopted to search and locate” 11 people in whose name urgent actions were registered
According to the report, the Cuban State finally provided “information that clarified the whereabouts of the people concerned” in the cases of the five occupants of the boat intercepted in February and the person transferred from the Guanajay prison, which is why the Committee was considering closing these urgent actions. However, the Committee regrets that the island’s government “has not yet provided any information on the measures adopted to search for and locate the other 11 people in whose name urgent actions were registered,” the document adds.
The organization also points out that “a large majority of the cases in which the missing person was located alive refer to disappearances that occurred in the context of protests in Colombia and Cuba,” where the detainees were deprived of their liberty while their relatives did not receive information about their fate or whereabouts.
The Committee also dedicates a section to so-called short-term forced disappearances and notes that during the period examined it registered allegations about two cases, one related to Cuba and the other to Mexico. The organization recalls that “there is no element of duration in the definition of forced disappearance in international human rights law.”
