This is not a performance: Cuban artist and dissident Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara kidnapped and tortured by Castro dictatorship for 20 days

“Luis Manuel must not spend one more day under state custody. He has been detained solely because of his consciously held beliefs and must be released immediately and unconditionally. It is time for the Cuban authorities to recognize that they cannot silence all the independent voices in the country,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International.

Concept taken from Norges Rodriguez

 

Today, May 22, 2021, marks 20 days since state security agents forced their way into Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara's home at 5:00am on May 2nd, and took him to Calixto Garcia Hospital. They refused to meet his demands, and feared the consequences, at the time, of the Cuban artist and dissident dying on a hunger and thirst strike.

Amnesty International on May 21, 2021 recognized  Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara as a prisoner of conscience for the third time since 2018. A day earlier on May 20, 2021 they issued an urgent action calling on members to write letters to the Cuban government demanding Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara's immediate and unconditional release and to condemn his detention.

 What is the immediate cause of this crisis and the urgency in demanding his release? 

#SOSCuba “Que No Se Apague La Llama Libertad“
Acción Performance colectiva de Osiris Cisneros & Olga Más con ProActivo Miami & Kiele Alessandra Cabrera & MSI en Miami & Dariel Fernandez 7 ADN Cuba por La Libertad de #Cuba Celebrando el 20 de Mayo #DiaDeLaIndependenciaNacional pic.twitter.com/fHg1ZIHXJC

— ProActivo Miami (@ProactivoM) May 21, 2021

 

On April 25, 2021, Otero Alcántara initiated a hunger and thirst strike to protest the seizure and destruction of his works of art on April 16, 2021, his de facto house arrest, and the ongoing persecution of artists. Officials arbitrarily detained activists, like rapper and poet AfrikReina who tried to visit Luis Manuel at his home, and forcibly isolated him.

News reports are emerging with sources claiming that Luis Manuel is being subjected to electroshock therapy. There is reason to be concerned with these emerging claims of psychiatric instruments being applied against the Cuban dissident.

In 1991 Freedom House and Of Human Rights published The Politics of Psychiatry in Revolutionary Cuba by Charles J. Brown and Armando M. Lago that reported on the political abuse of psychiatry in Cuba under the Castro regime. The preface was written by Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky in which he described how the Soviet Union used psychiatry as a weapon. Bukovsky observed that "Cuba in this regard is unique only by the hasty pace of the disease: it covered in thirty-two years what the Soviet Union achieved in seventy-three. Within a single generation, Cuba advanced from 'revolutionary justice' to 'socialist legality,' from liquidation of 'class enemies' to 'political re-education' and psychiatric treatment of those 'apathetic to socialism'."

Not only have regime agents used psychiatry as a weapon to destroy the psyches of dissidents, but  Calixto García Hospital has a track record of suspicious deaths of dissidents in a militarized environment.

Ministry of the Interior agents at the same hospital oversaw the untimely death of Ladies in White leader Laura Pollán in October 2011. She was isolated, relatives and friends not allowed to see her, and she died and was quickly cremated. There are numerous other cases of unexplained deaths in hospitals on the Island under the custody of State Security. Another one was that of the blind dissident Sergio Díaz Larrastegui in April 2012. In both cases, that of Pollán and that of Díaz Larrastegui, whose homes were headquarters in Havana of important human rights organizations, their deaths meant the closure of the headquarters and a severe blow to the civic movement.

In the case of Otero Alcántara, his home is the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement, an organization that in recent months has raised its voice in favor of freedom of expression on the Island, achieving numerous spontaneous and organized demonstrations in favor of their demands. The dictatorship that brought this activist to the brink of death cannot be trusted to now want to save him. We must demand that he be freed immediately and returned to family and friends.