Moya said he was not surprised because dissidents have been repeatedly pointing out that the “national security” exception was a violation of the rights of Cubans to travel at will. “This is a migration system that is totally politicized.”

Havana human rights activists Elizardo Sánchez Santa Cruz had also pointed out repeatedly that the 16 former political prisoners free on “extra penal licenses” who are still living in Cuba can be returned to prison or subjected to other sanctions at any time.

Moya has been briefly detained dozens of times by uniformed police and plainclothes State Security agents since he left prison in 2011, mostly to prevent him from participating in dissident activities and to intimidate him.

Last summer, he complained that State Security agents had kept him and five other members of his Democratic Freedom for Cuba Movement locked up for two days in the Cienaga de Zapata, a mosquito-infested swamp and the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, that was 29 miles from the town where he was arrested.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International, meanwhile, named Calixto Martínez, an independent Cuban journalist jailed since Sept. 16, as a “prisoner of conscience” and demanded that he be freed.

Martínez, who worked for the Hablemos Press Information Center, was detained in Havana while investigating the possible theft of a shipment of medicines sent by the world Health Organization to combat an outbreak of cholera.

His detention without charges “shows that authorities in Cuba are still far from accepting that journalists have a role to play in society, including the investigation of possible crimes,” AI said in a statement.

Martínez became the second prisoner of conscience in Cuba after Marcos Máiquel Lima Cruz, a youth detained in late 2010 for loudly playing hip hop songs that were considered to be critical of the government.

Amnesty International considers “prisoners of conscience” to be those people “jailed or under other physical restrictions because of their political, religious convictions or any other issue of conscience … so long as the person has not used or advocated violence.”