Cuban Artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara Exiled to the US
Cuban dissident performance artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara arrived in Miami on Saturday, July 18, after uncertainty following his scheduled release from a five-year prison sentence. According to San Isidro Movement (SIM) co-founder Coco Fusco, Otero Alcántara was removed from prison on July 7 and likely held incommunicado in a state “protocol house” until the US State Department approved humanitarian parole on July 17, after which Cuba’s Foreign Ministry put him on a flight to the US the next day. Otero Alcántara, a self-taught artist, co-founded SIM in 2018 to organize against Decree 349, a law requiring prior state approval for performances and exhibitions, and he was arrested in July 2021 amid anti-government protests after prior detentions and a forced hospitalization linked to a hunger and fluid strike. He was sentenced in June 2022 to five years in Guanajay maximum-security prison for charges including “contempt, defamation, and public disorder,” and after initially rejecting exile, he later said in an interview with El País that exile had become the only viable option.
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This story was covered in Repatriation Pride, Museum Scandals, and Heat Strikes