Heroin in Cuba: not individually verified

Also known as: diacetylmorphine, smack

We have not confirmed that Heroin specifically is scheduled in Cuba, so this page gives no legal status. Publishing a guess here would be worse than publishing nothing. What we do know is the governing national drug law, below.

What is on record

Not confirmed for Cuba, and the reason is structural rather than a gap in searching. Heroin is named nowhere in the Code, which is startling for an opioid of its severity and is a direct consequence of Cuba listing nothing. A court comparing it to cocaine under article 236(a) would have little difficulty, but the Code itself performs no such comparison and records no answer. Article 236(c) is a residual limb reaching «drogas ilícitas o sustancias de efectos similares no comprendidas en los apartados anteriores», punished by six months to one year or a fine. So if this substance is an illicit drug in Cuba it is caught, and the tier depends on whether a court reads it as «de efectos similares o superiores» to cocaine under article 236(a). Cuba operates no national list of controlled substances. The Código Penal creates the offences and names the subject matter only as «drogas ilícitas o sustancias de efectos similares», an undefined term. Across all 470,392 characters of the Code the words estupefaciente and psicotrópico appear zero times, and the only substances named anywhere are cocaína once and Cannabis, conocida por marihuana, twice.

Confirm directly with Cuba’s national drug authority or your own embassy before you rely on anything.

This page is deliberately excluded from search indexing and from our sitemap. Only confirmed, individually verified statuses are published as indexable pages.