A Havana courtroom introduced right this moment, June 24, that Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara will serve 5 years in jail for “contempt, defamation, and public dysfunction,” expenses human rights organizations have condemned as trumped-up and arbitrary.
Otero Alcántara, founding father of the dissident San Isidro Motion (SIM), has been held within the Guanajay maximum-security jail since final summer time, when the most important anti-government protests in many years broke out throughout the island. Rapper Maykel “Osorbo” Pérez, one other SIM member whose music “Patria y Vida” turned a rallying cry for Cuban liberation in the course of the demonstrations, was sentenced right this moment to 9 years in jail. They’re amongst almost 500 folks sentenced this week for his or her participation in final yr’s demonstration, dubbed 11J, some for as much as 30 years, based on the Inter-American Fee on Human Rights.
Curator Claudia Genlui, Otero Alcántara’s accomplice, known as the sentences “an important disrespect and an injustice.”
“They’re condemning them for making artwork,” she instructed Hyperallergic.
Otero Alcántara and Pérez are a part of a gaggle of vocal advocates for artistic freedom on the island who’ve confronted relentless persecution, harassment, and incarceration for his or her peaceable expressions of dissent. Final Could, Cuban officers entered Otero Alcántara’s home and studio and seized a number of artworks together with “Garrote Vil,” a sculpture evoking a strangulation machine that he utilized in performances. The raid prompted the artist to start a starvation and thirst strike, certainly one of many he has undertaken, every extra debilitating than the final. He was then forcibly hospitalized by state safety brokers in what SIM member Camila Remón described as “a kidnapping,” with dozens of artists together with Dawoud Bey, Julie Mehretu, and Carrie Mae Weems calling for his launch.
Otero Alcántara was briefly launched solely to be arrested weeks later on the outset of protests in Havana, together with lots of of anti-government demonstrators. The artist, who has survived two starvation strikes whereas in jail, was requested to go away the nation completely in change for his launch, a technique generally employed by the Cuban authorities to expel essential voices. Final October, artist Tania Bruguera agreed to go away the island in change for the discharge of 25 prisoners, together with Hamlet Lavastida, who was compelled into exile.
In a letter written from jail forward of his trial, revealed by Hyperallergic final month, Otero Alcántara defined his determination to stay in Cuba.
“So many individuals I really like now reside in exile, with out the potential of returning as a result of a dictatorship prevents them from doing so,” Otero Alcántara wrote. “The regime has destroyed my paintings and violated my rights and the rights of my mates in so many different methods.”
“After all, regardless of the stress, regardless of the truth that proper now there are lots of people in jail, it was my flip to be right here and from right here I’ll proceed to maneuver ahead,” the letter concludes.
