A few questions about the impending release of Cuban political prisoners

The announcement this week that 52 Cuban political prisoners will be released in coming months is very good news for the prisoners, who never should have been in prison to begin with, and their families. No one should try to take that away from them, even as important questions about this week's developments remain unanswered.

Here are a few questions I have:

• What's the excuse for not releasing all 52 prisoners immediately? After all, most of them were arrested during a three-day period in March 2003. You would think the Castro dictatorship could just as efficiently let them go free.
• How much goodwill will the releases, even before they are completed, buy the Castro dictatorship in the international community. Spain will use its deal with Havana to harden its argument for the scrapping of the European Union's "common position" linking member states' relations with Cuba to the dictatorship's human rights practices — practices that even if there was not a single political prisoner in the Castro gulag, would still leave Cuba one of the world's most repressed societies.
• Will the Catholic Church in Cuba use whatever new clout it has banked to be more aggressive with the regime in demanding further concessions or will it revert to its long-established docility?
• Will Ariel Sigler Amaya, who was released from prison on June 12, be allowed to travel to the United States for needed medical care? Sigler had complained that the Cuban government had imposed "obstacles" on his ability to travel to the U.S. after the American government granted him a visa.
• What effect will the release have on the current debate in the United States about whether to lift limits on travel to and trade with Cuba?
• How many of the released prisoners will travel to the United States? With all due respect to friends of Cuban freedom in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, it is Americans who most need to hear the stories that the prisoners will have to tell about their experiences and their continuing struggle for change and freedom in Cuba. It is their voices — regardless of what they think about the so-called "embargo" — that Americans need to hear as the leadership in Washington considers how, if at all, to change its relationship with Havana.

As for who really deserves the credit for what happened this week, re-read what I wrote earlier.