Imprisoned Cuban artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has written a new editorial pleading for international support in the popular struggle against his native country’s communist government.
“On behalf of the 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 in the missive published this week in THE Miami Herald. “All we have done is demand the right to choose our political future and say what we think.”
“No one should have to give up their youth for such a just cause,” he concluded.
Otero Alcántara, 34, was arrested on his way to a demonstration in Havana on July 11, 2021. He was held in prison until his hearing in June 2022, when he was sentenced to five years in prison for contempt, disturbing public order and promoting “insulting symbols of the homeland”, according to a press release issued at the time by the Cuban attorney general’s office. The ad alluded to Otero Alcántara’s use of the Cuban flag during artistic performances.
On the same day, Grammy Award-winning rapper Maykel Castillo was sentenced to nine years in prison for similar offences. Both men are prominent members of the San Isidro Movement Cuban activist group.
Among other artists and human rights activists, the penalties were widely seen as excessive and an example of the state’s growing efforts to silence dissent. Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International, called the sentences a “shameful example of the human rights crisis caused by the Cuban government’s decades-long policy of repression”.
For Otero Alcántara, the sentence capped a series of several years of punitive actions imposed against him by the government.
“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 police,” he 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.”
The artist went on to describe the conditions of his imprisonment in Guanajay, a maximum-security penitentiary southwest of Havana. He said he had been separated from other political prisoners and was only allowed out occasionally. “I lost weight due to the scarcity of food and the poor quality of meals,” he added.
Spurred by food and medicine shortages and the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2021 protests were the largest seen on the island of Cuba in nearly 20 years. Although the exact numbers remain unknown, human rights groups have reported that more than 1,400 protesters have been arrested and at least half of them are still behind bars. (In his editorial, Otero Alcántara puts the number of arrests at more than 1,800. “Of these, 897 have been tried and 777 are still in prison,” he wrote. “Many are minors. Some were sentenced to up to 30 years for sedition.”)
“Today, every young Cuban is a political prisoner. A censored artist. An exile inside and outside Cuba,” the editorial by Otero Alcántara continued. “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.
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