He has become the most visible face of the opposition to the Cuban government.
Artist, black, young and of humble origin , Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is today one of the most prominent members of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), a dissident group that denounces the lack of freedom on the island and demands an opening.
It has been in its pulse for years to the State, but lately that pulse is more tense than ever.
The 25 began a hunger and thirst strike in April after a group of officials broke into his home and took away his works.
Eight days later, they did it again, this time to take him to a hospital in Havana.
Since then, the Provincial Health Directorate of Havana has issued several medical reports with little and apparently contradictory information. In a first communication, it was said that he had been hospitalized for “referred voluntary starvation”, but no “signs of malnutrition” were found and “his clinical and biochemical parameters were normal”.
The 10, a statement posted on Facebook stated that he had been treated by “a multidisciplinary team that guaranteed the recovery of his state of health” and that “he is currently asymptomatic.”
Why, if his health is good, is he still in custody at the hospital? None of the three videos that have been released since then, in which he appears in the health center, have served to clarify it.
His relatives denounce that the government hospitalized him to silence his critical voice and that the enormous deployment of security around the hospital prevents family and friends from visiting it.
Representatives of the United States and the European Union have asked the authorities to guarantee his health and reiterated his calls to respect freedom of expression and assembly in Cuba . Amnesty International has demanded that the Cuban government be released “immediately and unconditionally.”
The government, on the other hand, accuses him of being “a mercenary at the service of the United States” and mounting “shows and media farces. ”
Patient or prisoner, Otero Alcántara is today one of the most prominent characters on the Cuban scene and a recurring problem for the island’s government.
The president of Cuba himself, Miguel Díaz-Canel, wrote on Twitter last November that the MSI, which has one of its founders in Otero Alcántara, was a “show of reality show imperial ”and alleged that“ United States government officials ”were“ in charge of the care and provisioning of its operational base in Cuba. ”
The president’s statements took place after the artist, together with another group of people, started another hunger strike that was also forcibly stopped by the police.
A day later, more from 500 young people gathered in front of the island’s Ministry of Culture to show their solidarity with the strikers in one of the largest demonstrations that have taken place against the government in recent 60 years.
Since then, the arrest of members of the MSI or acts of the police against them have also led to unusual demonstrations in Cuba.
A neighborhood boy
Although he has become an icon of the Havana neighborhood of San Isidro, Otero Alcántara was not born there, but in El Cerro , another popular area of the Cuban capital.
Art curator Claudia Genlui, who was his partner until January and remains his friend, told BBC Mundo that the artist “He had a very difficult childhood and grew up with practically no resources.”
Firstborn of four siblings, their father spent a lot of time in jail for a common crime and, according to Genlui, “in that world it was understood that the eldest son, especially if he was a boy, should focus on looking for money to help his family, so Luis Manuel had a hard time getting his artistic vocation to be accepted in his environment. ”
The absence of his father contributed to the weight of his uncle Énix, who provided him with his first books and took him to art galleries for the first time.
“His uncle has been an opponent for many years and supports him unconditionally. They both maintain mutual admiration ”, says Genlui.
The young Luis Manuel had to overcome the criticism and ridicule that in the street environment in which he grew up caused his inclination for art, which accentuated when some physical problems truncated his incipient career in athletics, a discipline in which he came to compete in speed events in youth categories.
“From then on he began to take more and more serious art ”, explains Genlui.
Outside the State
Father of two children with two different wives, Otero Alcántara, from 33 years, he was making a name for himself in the Cuban art scene, always on the fringes of the official circuits.
“He was black and from the neighborhood, and that marked him in the eyes of the artists who benefited from the fact that they did have a dialogue with power, “Anamely Ramos, also an art curator and now a member of the San Isidro Movement, told BBC Mundo.
That was one of the reasons why Ramos wanted to meet him. “I found a self-made artist, who, despite the fact that many in the academy rejected him at first, he was very sure of what he had created,” he says in conversation with BBC Mundo.
“It started in sculpture. He left his works abandoned in the streets, seeking to highlight the crisis of the public that exists in Cuba and showing a great capacity to connect with the most humble public and make them reflect. ”
To those who have treated him, his ability to tune in with the most disadvantaged in Cuban society is a reflection of his personality. “He is a very cheerful and open man, who finds it very easy to connect with people and make their problems his own,” says Ramos.
According to journalist Abraham Jiménez Enoa, this is what has made “the regime so concerned with him.”
His performances were increasingly provocative and raised blisters with one he called “Drapeau”, in which he carried the Cuban flag like a second skin for a month, in an apparent attempt to denounce how the Cuban government supplements its inability to satisfy the demands of the population with propaganda.
This performance led the Cuban authorities to open a criminal case and arrest him, although the rejection that led to his arrest in networks led to his rapid release.
Initiatives like this gave p ie to one of the criticisms most frequently made by his detractors: “None of this has to do with art,” said Pedro de la Hoz, president of the Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba, in statements quoted by the portal ” 14 and Medium ”.
For Carlos Manuel Álvarez, journalist and friend of his, Otero Alcántara“ challenged hierarchies that are often assumed in Cuba without anyone questioning them and he quickly understood that any proposal for viable change had to be raised outside the structures of the State. ”
Pascal Fletcher, analyst specialized in Cuba from BBC Monitoring points out that “there have always been dissidents, but the difference with Otero and the rest of the MSI is that their criticisms of power are frontal and open, and they have managed to exploit the development of the Internet in Cuba so that their actions have more visibility.”
“Today we see scenes in which people confront the authorities and it is or it was not usual in Cuba, ”says Fletcher, who believes that messages like those of the MSI find a favorable breeding ground in the difficult economic situation the country is going through. “At the beginning of the year they started what the government called Task Order, which is actually a reform that has caused a social impact in the midst of the pandemic. There is great discomfort because prices have risen and it is more difficult to get food. ”
The decree 349
Otero’s activism was accentuated after the approval in 997 of the controversial Decree 349, one of the first signed by the new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, who imposed strong restrictions on artistic creation on the island and that even motivated the moderate criticism of Silvio Rodríguez, a singer-songwriter identified for decades with the Cuban ruling party.
“We started doing performances in which we tried to show that in Cuba the State can do whatever it wants with people “, recalls Claudia Genlui, who accompanied him in some projects.
” El garrote vil “, one of his best known creations, dates from that time. provocative, and one of those recently l e have been confiscated by the authorities. He used to sit on it as part of his actions against what he considered abuses of power.
The doors will remain open and ready for the world to see the crimes of a dictatorship that masquerades as humanists and they are the worst . # libertyparaluisrobles # libertyparadenissolis # LibertadParaLosPoliticosCubanos pic.twitter.com/gRs0MZRXic
– Luis M. Alcantara (@LMOAlcantara) April 25, 2021
Together with art historian Yanelys Núñez Leyva and other collaborators created the Museum of Dissidence in Cuba, a virtual space that, in the words of Otero Alcántara himself, claims “the value of freedom of expression as the backbone of all societies.”
Initiatives like this made him converge more and more with a heterogeneous group of artists, intellectuals and activists who share were their demand for an opening in the Cuban political system, that in 2018 began the replacement in his leadership, with the departure of Raúl Castro from the presidency and recently culminated with his resignation as first secretary of the Communist Party.
Otero Alcántara’s house on Damas Street, in the historic San Isidro neighborhood of Old Havana, became the epicenter of this dissident activism and the headquarters of the movement that would bear the name of the neighborhood.
His friends say that he had bought it almost in ruins for little money and he reformed it himself until he left it as an almost empty space, through which his pet roamed freely, a hen that he never put name but well known among his neighbors for his fondness to jump onto the street from the roof.
“For him, the important thing is not to have things, but space to be able to do things for people ”, Says Genlui.
According to the government As a non-Cuban, what took place there were “counterrevolutionary” activities. Humberto López, a state television presenter recently appointed to the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, has repeatedly accused dissidents of receiving funding from the United States and following the procedures s of the “unconventional war” supposedly designed in Washington against the Cuban “revolution.”
President Díaz-Canel attended a concert in Havana to denounce a “media campaign” in support of the San Isidro Movement.
Fletcher highlights that “the development of the Internet in Cuba in recent years has left the government without a monopoly on narrative and now they are forced to answer. Now almost every day there are attacks on the opposition in the state press, when before they could be allowed to ignore them. ”
Coinciding with the replacement in power of Raúl Castro by Miguel Díaz-Canel and the rise of a new generation of leaders, the MSI’s friction with the authorities became more frequent and serious.
Carlos Manuel Álvarez, now in Miami, comments: “Either we saw each other at parties or we saw each other when the police stopped us.”
Lately , his attempt to carry out a performance with a children’s audience to denounce how difficult it is for Cuban children to get sweets and candies had put him under the microscope again and from his circle they assure that State security kept him locked up and incommunicado in his house.
Otero would also denounce that the island’s authorities placed a surveillance camera at the entrance of his building.
The agents who took away his works were followed by a hunger and thirst strike. “Their demands were very accessible,” says Genlui. “He only wanted his works returned, but the government has refused to talk.”
Few dare to predict when and how he will leave the hospital; nor how will his defiance of the state end.
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