HAVANA.- “We are getting closer to freedom every day,” said the Cuban artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, in exclusive statements to Martí Noticias on the occasion of the third anniversary of the national uprising against the communist regime, which took place in dozens of towns on the island between July 11 and 12, 2021.
“Here, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and I remain super-connected and I remain with the same strength, possibly stronger than before, more mature. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. I believe that we cannot lose faith. I believe that we must continue with the same energy as three years ago. Five years ago, nobody thought that there would be an 11th, so, today, we are closer to freedom every day,” said the creator of the San Isidro Movement from the Maximum Security Prison of Guanajay, according to the website. Radio Television Martí.
Otero Alcántara was imprisoned on July 11, 2021, after joining the protests against the dictatorship that took place throughout the island. The following year he was sentenced to five years in prison for public disorder, contempt and insulting the symbols of the country, after a trial held behind closed doors.
“I am super-connected even if it costs me my own life. And even if nothing… we are going to die one day, at 20, at 30, at 60, at 100 years old, we are going to die, so it is better to spend this whole life depending on the other, depending on our children, depending on the fact that this country is still worth it,” declared the artist recognized as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International.
“From here, from any reality in the world, not just Cuba, I believe that each one of us, as Amaury Pacheco said, in every place in the world, each one of us lights a candle, we are super connected,” he commented in reference to the initiative of the artist of the San Isidro Movement, Amaury Pacheco, currently exiled in the United States.
In February 2024, the Artemisa Provincial People’s Court rejected a request for conditional release in favor of the political prisoner because the Cuban judicial authorities considered that with Otero Alcántara “the purposes of the sentence have not been achieved” and that the 36-year-old political prisoner “is not in a position to face social reintegration in a positive way before his family and society, especially when it is a crime regulated in instruction 273 of the Governing Council of the Supreme People’s Court” and therefore determined that he must “remain in prison.”
The political prisoner was selected by the magazine Time as “one of the 100 most influential people of 2021” and was also awarded the prestigious Prince Klaus Prize, among other distinctions.
Source: Editorial/With information from Martí News