“The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.”
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Frederick Douglass
Where is Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara? According to ISM spokesperson Michel Matos, both Luis Manuel and Anamely Ramos González were detained again at 6:00am by Castro's secret police. State security did not want Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara to return to his home, the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement. Anamely is now back home, and has made video declarations confirming her continuing commitment, and that she is under a de facto house arrest.Several sources, including the San Isidro Movement Twitter, are saying that Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is at the Hospital Manuel Fajardo in Havana, Cuba and still on hunger strike, but those closest to Luis Manuel have not been able to see him.
Cuban artist Denis Solís González,
who was sentenced to eight months in prison for “contempt” for speaking critically of a police officer illegally searching his home, remains at Valle Grande, a maximum-security prison
just outside Havana. The demands of the San Isidro Movement hunger strikers have not been met, and the hunger strike continues.
This morning over social media the University of Miguel de Cervantes in Chile held the second day of the seventh session of the International Encounter Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas to discuss the Christian Democratic thought that the martyred Cuban leader lived through action throughout his life in Cuba before being murdered by the Castro dictatorship together with Harold Cepero on July 22, 2012. Medgar Evers, the American civil rights leader gunned down in his drive way on June 12, 1963 for advocating for an end to Jim Crow segregation through non-violent change, wrote prophetically that "you can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea." Oswaldo Payá was killed, but his ideas live on both inside and outside of Cuba, and continue to do good.
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Ofelia Acevedo Maura calls for solidarity with San Isidro hunger strikers
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This morning Oswaldo's widow, Ofelia Acevedo Maura, closed the session at the University of Miguel de Cervantes with an appeal for solidarity with the San Isidro Movement hunger strikers.
"Today in my country there is a group of brave youth that preferred to risk their lives on hunger strike than to continue living in the lies that annihilate the soul. State security assaulted the home that they were in, and took them beating them while they were locked up. We still don’t know where three of them are. Some were already very weak. This desperate cry of freedom for these young people reaches the world through you gathered in this forum."
The Washington Post's editorial board
today addressed what happened on November 26, 2020 at approximately at 8:00pm:
CUBA’S POLICE broke down the door of an artists’ collective in Old Havana on Thursday night and detained about 14 people, several of whom were on a hunger strike. Most were later released,
but the raid showed just how uneasy the Cuban government is with even a
hint of protest or whisper of dissent. Art must run free, but in Cuba
it must obey.
Last week this blog highlighted the physical assault against the San Isidro Movement headquarters and posted a photo of a bloodied Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, and discussed the origins of the movement in the 2018 campaign against the Castro regime's Decree 349, a law that further restricted artistic expression in Cuba.
The dictatorship tried brute violence, escalated with a forced eviction of all the activists from the home of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara that is also the San Isidro Movement's headquarters, together with an act of repudiation organized outside to shout down the protesters as they were beaten up by the secret police inside the vehicles they were spirited away.
This movement responded to each escalation of violence with a non-violent response that challenged the regime. Restrictions on getting food, and regime contaminating the water supply with a chemical agent, okay the strongest started a hunger and thirst strike to conserve supplies for the weakest among them. Following an individual knocking down the door to the entrance with a hammer, they carried out their call for Cubans across the country to go to public parks and peacefully protest. When they were dislodged and beaten on November 26th the following day hundreds of young people gathered outside of the Castro regime's Ministry of Culture and challenged the dictatorship.
Today at 4:00pm the San Isidro Movement will be announcing what their next steps will be. Friends of freedom please keep an eye on what is going on in Cuba they need both your witness and solidarity.
Witnessing what has taken place over the past 20 days in Cuba reminds me of the lyrics to a Peter Gabriel song from 1980 that warns repressive regimes that they cannot blow out a fire. The events of yesterday indicate that a fire is raging in Cuba that is seeking change. The crowds outside are but the tip of the iceberg, and this fire is raging in the minds of millions of Cubans striving to live in freedom.
"You can blow out a candle
But you can't blow out a fire
Once the flames begin to catch
The wind will blow it higher"
Peter Gabriel, Biko
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