Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Cuban artist and leader of the militant movement San Isidro (MSI), wrote an opinion piece, published July 10 in the Miami Heraldurging countries around the world to help Cuban dissidents in their fight against the country’s communist government.
“On behalf of young Cubans locked up in the island’s horrible prisons, I call on people of conscience around the world to support our struggle to free ourselves and our country,” Otero Alcántara wrote. “All we have done is demand the right to choose our political future and say what we think.”
The artist was apprehended by authorities on July 11, 2021, on his way to one of the historic protests that rocked Havana that summer as food and electricity shortages gripped the country. He was then transported to Guanajay, a maximum security prison about 35 miles southwest of Havana, where he was held for nearly a year without being heard, despite Cuban law prohibiting the detention of a person for more than six months without giving him a trial. In June 2022, following a series of closed-door trials in Havana, he was found guilty of contempt, public disorder and “insult” to Cuba, presumably by incorporating his flag into his depictions, and sentenced to five years in prison.
named one of TimeMost Influential Person of 2021 in the very month of his arrest, Otero Alcántara had already been forcibly hospitalized in Havana in May 2021, more than a week after going on a hunger strike to protest the seizure or destruction by government of several of his works that spring. . His arrest in July 2021, which drew worldwide condemnation, was the latest in a series of unlawful detentions he suffered following the rise to power of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel in 2018. Under the regime de Díaz-Canel, artists and others who protested government censorship were constantly persecuted by the state.
“They have been harassing me for years, arresting me 50 times between 2017 and 2021 and also for defamation, violation of privacy, threats and beatings by the police,” Otero Alcántara wrote. “But it wasn’t until the historic protest in 2021 that the regime decided to lock me up longer so that I could no longer communicate with my people.”
Citing the “more than 1,800 Cubans, mostly young and black” who were arrested during the protests, the artist noted: “Among them, 897 have been tried and 777 are still in prison. Many are minors. Some were sentenced to up to 30 years for sedition. Otero Alcántara, who is thirty-four years old, wrote: “I speak as a young man in the Cuba of today. We are full of energy and confidence, determined to lend our talents to the quest for a truly democratic and free Cuba. The regime that has survived for 64 years on the Caribbean’s largest island is once again trying to crush a generation, just as it crushed and obliterated those who came before us.
“Today, every young Cuban is a political prisoner,” he continued. “A censored artist. An exile inside and outside Cuba. Even if you are an accomplice of the system, you will inevitably be crushed like the others, because to be young is to be bold and reckless, eager to change the world. It means fighting for love, dreams and utopia. But these qualities are considered crimes in Cuba, and this condemns us all to martyrdom.
