MIAMI — Imprisoned Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, whose performances and hunger strikes have inspired a pro-democracy artists’ movement on the island, is again refusing to eat to call attention to the incarceration of hundreds of Cubans who protested against the government on July 11.
Otero Alcántara, who is currently in a maximum-security prison in Guanajay, west of Havana, was arrested that day when he tried to join the demonstrations. He faces charges of assault, contempt of the authorities and resisting police. His partner, art curator Claudia Genlui, posted on Facebook about his decision to go on hunger strike last week. But family and friends have been left in the dark about his condition, she told the Herald.
“We know nothing,” Genluis said in an interview from Havana. “I went to the prison system’s office handling inquiries from citizens to seek an update on his condition, and I had no answer.”
By her count, Otero Alcántara started the hunger strike a week ago, on Sept. 27. She said they last spoke on Sept. 21, and he warned her that if she didn’t hear from him by the 27th it would be because he had started the protest. A fellow Guanajay inmate confirmed the information, Genlui said.
“Luis Manuel told me he was doing it for his freedom and that of the other protesters incarcerated,” she said.
Otero Alcántara has become a prominent figure in Cuba’s artistic and political landscape as a vocal critic of the Cuban government and leader of the art collective Movimiento San Isidro, even winning a spot as one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2020. The Cuban government’s violent response to a hunger strike led by him and other members of the San Isidro movement, asking for the release of rapper Denis Solis, prompted a rare public demonstration by a few hundred young artists and activists in November last year. They later organized in the so-called 27N movement, which is also advocating for freedom of expression on the island.
Otero Alcántara was again on a hunger strike in April this year to protest Cuban authorities’ confiscation of his works of art.
After Genlui announced that he was on a hunger strike, two other activists started a voluntary fast. Art historian Carolina Barrero, an active member of the 27N movement whom state security agents have confined to her home for almost six months, said she started a voluntary fast last Saturday “to protest for the hundreds of people that the regime keeps in prison for exercising their rights to freedom of thought and freedom to demonstrate,” she said on a Facebook post.
“The Cuban government continues to play chess with the lives of young people, banishing them, imprisoning them, breaking them physically and emotionally. Let’s see how many more lives they are willing to take on their backs,” said poet and activist Afrika Reina, who also started a voluntary fast Thursday.
Cuban activists led by Cubalex, an organization that provides legal advice to Cuban dissidents, have verified at least 1,096 arrests in connection to the islandwide demonstrations in July; 549 people are still detained.
Many face the prospects of many years in prison, like Roberto Pérez Fonseca. He was tried last week, and prosecutors asked for a 12-year sentence for being part of a group that destroyed what appeared in videos to be an image of Fidel Castro. Yoan de la Cruz, who first live-streamed the initial protest in the city of San Antonio de Los Baños, faces as much as eight years in prison, family members told independent news outlet 14ymedio.
Félix Navarro, 68, a former political prisoner detained on July 11 when he tried to get information about other dissidents arrested in the province of Matanzas went on hunger strike for several days but stopped on Sept. 21, Cubadecide announced on Twitter.
Like many other protesters, including Navarro, Otero Alcántara got COVID-19 in jail. “He was just coming out of it when we last spoke,” Genlui said. The pandemic is affecting the detainees and their families in other ways too. “Because of COVID, it’s very difficult to go to the Guanajay prison because you need government permission to move from Havana to another province,” she added.
Despite the hunger strikes and the international condemnation, the Cuban government seems set on prosecuting the protesters. The crackdown on protesters has become another point of contention with the Biden administration, which was conducting a review of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba when the July 11 events prompted the administration to pause any measures that could be seen as helping the communist regime. Instead, the administration sanctioned several government agencies and officials involved in putting down the protests.
“It is a pity that President Biden could not implement his own policy towards Cuba; it’s a terrible mistake,” Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez said in a recent interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, referring to Trump administration policies toward Cuba. He insisted that the July 11 demonstrations, peaceful by most accounts, were violent but did not deny that hundreds of people were detained.
“Cuba is a rule-of-law state, and we have to respect our laws,” he said.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Embassy in Havana tweeted in Spanish: “The Cuban regime must free @LMOAlcantara, who is ill and being punished by his jailers for his current hunger strike. Unjustly detained along with hundreds of peaceful protesters on July 11, we ask for their immediate release and ask #JailedForWhat.”
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