The opposition Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation said Tuesday that in December there were a record 796 temporary arrests for political reasons on the Communist-ruled island.

The government “continues to criminalize, with an anachronistic Penal Code, the free exercise of all civil, political, economic and cultural rights,“the commission said in a report.

Commission spokesman Elizardo Sanchez blamed the “repressive tendency” of the Cuban regime for the high number of arrests in a month when World Human Rights Day was celebrated and when a flotilla of exiles from Miami in international waters off the Cuban coast shot off fireworks in support of dissidents on the island.

Most of the arrests in December were brief and some lasted several days, according to the commission, which denounced in its report the “countless cases of police violence.”