Cuba extends the death penalty to drug trafficking

Law 87 rewrote Cuba’s principal drug-trafficking provision and made specified aggravated offences punishable by fifteen to thirty years in prison or death. The National Assembly adopted the law on 16 February 1999. It appeared in the Gaceta Oficial on 15 March, and its final provision made publication the starting point for its operation.

The amendment was part of a wider revision of the Penal Code, not a separate cannabis statute. Cannabis was expressly included within the provision, but the maximum penalty was not the sentence for every person possessing it.

Trafficking and cultivation in one provision

Article 10 of the amending law replaced article 190. Its ordinary range was four to ten years. The conduct included unauthorised production, transport and trafficking, possession for trafficking, and providing drugs to another person.

The same article expressly covered cultivation of the plant it called Cannabis Indica, known as marihuana, and knowing possession of its seeds or parts. This was the statute’s terminology, rather than a restriction limited to a modern retail category called indica.

Cultivation also exposed landholders to confiscation of their land or loss of the right to use or occupy it. The consequence reached beyond the prison sentence to the legal basis on which the grower held the land.

When the maximum rose to death

Relatively large quantities carried eight to twenty years under article 190(2). A separate aggravated range of fifteen to thirty years or death applied in circumstances specified in paragraph 3.

Those circumstances included officials exploiting their position or state resources, involvement in international trafficking, and using a person under sixteen in the offence. The wording supplied conditions for the enhanced penalty; it did not authorise treating all cannabis offences as capital cases.

The provision also punished failure to report known preparation or execution of these offences, and addressed preparatory acts. It built an enforcement framework around drug activity rather than confining liability to the final sale.

Simple possession remained distinct

The consolidated code placed simple possession in article 191. Cannabis possession without the required authorisation or medical prescription carried six months to two years, a fine, or both. The annotation attributes that wording to the 1994 amendment, not Law 87.

Consequently, a description giving only the four-to-ten-year range would omit the separate possession offence. A description saying cannabis possession automatically carried death would be more seriously misleading. Both the conduct and the aggravating circumstances mattered.

A historical code, later replaced

Cuba replaced this code with Law 151 in 2022. The new text retained separate possession and cultivation provisions and continued to provide capital punishment in aggravated drug cases, with altered ranges and conditions.

The 1999 amendment establishes that the penalty existed in law. It does not establish an execution for cannabis, and none was identified in the records reviewed for this article. A statutory maximum and evidence of a sentence being imposed or carried out must remain separate historical claims.^[1][2][3]