Luis Manuel Otero, Cuba’s most famous political prisoner, speaks from jail: “Either martyr or off the island”

The artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has been given a few minutes to make his Tuesday call. He picks up a public telephone in the maximum security prison of Guanajay, on the outskirts of Havana, and at 1:5 p.m. the artist answers a few questions for as long as the prison authorities allow. Otero Alcántara is Cuba’s most famous political prisoner, and, according to him, “the most dangerous” for the government. When Cubans thought they could not have a leader, tired of their own, the figure of Luis Manuel, a self-taught artist, emerged from the poor black neighborhood of El Cerro.

His phrase “we are connected”, his challenging performanceshis various police arrests, his hunger and thirst strikes, and finally his quartering in his house, the headquarters of the well-known San Isidro Movement, made the eyes of not only Cubans on the island turn to him, but also those of the entire exile and part of the international community. In September 2021, his face appeared among the 100 most influential personalities of the magazine Timealongside Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, pop star Britney Spears, tennis player Naomi Osaka and Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny. “Their tireless fight for freedom of expression and their uncompromising stance against autocracy reveal the power of resistance,” it said in the pages of that publication.Chinese artist Ai WeiWei: “His life, behavior, and expression together are so powerful that they can resist the aesthetic and ethical degeneration of authoritarianism.”

The last time Otero Alcántara walked the streets of Havana was on July 11, 2021. The date marks the largest anti-system protest that has taken place in Cuba since the Revolution came to power. Thousands of Cubans took to the streets, and thousands more ended up becoming political prisoners. Three years after his imprisonment, with a sentence of five years of deprivation of liberty for the alleged crimes of insulting national symbols, contempt and public disorder, Otero Alcántara clearly remembers the moment when the Cuban police charged against him on Prado Street, when he was heading to join the demonstration, which he says was one of the happiest days of his life.

Ask.Do you have any particular memories of July 11, 2021, your last day before prison?

Answer. Yes, it had been a good week. We were working, organizing a kind of first aid kit to bring medicine to Cuba for the Covid-19 issue, and that day, like many others, I was also surprised by the huge number of people on the streets. In fact, I thought that what was happening was normal. At that time, it was relatively common for people to go out to protest because there was no water, but they were small protests. That day, at the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement, many people told me: ‘Luis Manuel, call, call, call,’ and I have never really believed that I have the power to call people like people think I have, and that was when I was released. I left without a phone, disconnected from everything, until today. That is one of the happiest days of my life. In fact, when they stopped me and put me in a patrol car with three guards, the patrol’s radio announcer was announcing: ‘Hey, thousands of people are coming down San Lázaro Street, thousands of people are coming down Trillo Park.’ And at that moment I said: ‘Well, now it’s really over.’ And the patrol driver told me: ‘But you’re not going to be there.’ And I told him: ‘I don’t need to be there, I already did what I was going to do.’ Next to me there was a young guard wearing a mask, who made a sign to me as if to say: ‘No, we are connected’.

P.At some point you became the most famous and probably the most followed person in all of Cuba. What do you think you did to occupy that place?

R.I have never seen myself as a pretty guy and people see me as a bit pretty, for example. It’s the same thing that happens with this. I started out from the need to make art, it’s an illness, it’s my vice, in which I believe. I believe in that, in the love of others. Since I was a child I always had that, being worried about others, worried about the child who didn’t have one, even when I didn’t have one either. If I carried a peso, I would split it in half with the person next to me. I have that, and it’s not a curse, but sometimes it’s a kind of non-blessing, because being worried about others means that I’m not in Hawaii, living like any artist of my generation. But there is a responsibility with others that never abandons me. I am one of the happiest guys in the world. My happiness is paid for when I do things for others. And that comes intrinsically, within me, I don’t propose it. Starting from there I make art committed to reality. Reality itself has often put me to the test. I went to Madrid, I could have stayed, I could have chosen the easy path of art, of painting flowers, or I could have made a kind of political art that was simply a discourse and that did not activate real content within reality, and that did not move reality, because art moves reality if you as an artist propose it. Otherwise it becomes a political caricature. From there, I continued working and continued working, and suddenly I realized that a lot of people were connected in the same line. Also, because of a certain madness that I have, I resist aggression differently. And also because of the leadership vacuum that exists in Cuba, many people put me in that place. It was a mix: a certain charisma that I believe I have, the work that creates an impact, a commitment to people. Contemporary reality is not rigid, and being an artist, having certain freedoms, makes me embrace a little more than if I had been a politician, something that implies behaving in a certain way, dressing in a certain way, and I love freedom above all else.

P.So let’s talk about freedom. What is freedom for you: how imprisoned are you, how free are you?

R. I am a prisoner, of course. Freedom is a construction, in the sense that it is built day by day. You are not free, you are a little bit freer than yesterday and a little bit less than tomorrow. In that construction you lose possibilities. For example, I have to go to bed at a certain time, get up at a certain time, I live behind bars, I can only talk twice a week. On the street you can always talk, you can drink cold water, you can have sex. These are all the limitations that are taken away from you, those spaces that tell you “you are not free.” Here there are those who decide how you dress, how you shave, how you do your hair. All of these are freedoms that you lose when you are in prison, and I am in prison. Luckily here I can paint, I think it is one of the few spaces of my own freedom. They have not wanted to get involved in it, because if they do they know they will kill me. I think that thanks to art, to painting, to drawing, I have been able to survive these three years. I continue drawing, painting, doing things. I have a lot of projects, things that take me back to my childhood, childhood traumas, sex in childhood, abuse by teachers. In three years I have a lot, probably every week I come up with an idea. Otherwise, in this confinement I would be like a sparrow, and I would have been behind bars a long time ago.

P.You have already said that you accept exile, leaving Cuba, in exchange for being released. But if you serve your entire sentence, will you also leave Cuba?

R.First of all, two years ago I agreed to leave as an option to continue working, as a way, as an entity of struggle, because I am a fighting animal, and I will continue fighting not only against this power, but against all evils, against racism, homophobia. Art is the tool that God or whatever exists provided me as a human being. From then on, I will be an eternal fighter, and an eternal resister of what I believe is wrong. I never thought of leaving, but the regime says that there is no option to walk the streets of Cuba because of the danger that they have made me believe I am, or that people believe I am. I realized that the art I make is a danger to them, and well, the other option is exile or to continue fighting. Just as they built me ​​these five years from nothing, from falsehood, they can build another five or ten years and relatively nothing would happen. So I chose exile. But if these two more years go by, or whatever time they decide, I’m not going anywhere, because I don’t want to leave Cuba. That’s the big problem: either I’m a martyr or I’m out of Cuba. I don’t see any other way out.

P.So how do you imagine the day when you finally get out of prison? What’s the first thing you plan to do?

R.The day I am released seems like a work of art, a rigid canvas. I imagine that I will go through a complicated process, two or three days, passing through different places until I reach exile. Mind you, that is in case they release me soon, because if one more day passes, I am thinking that I will go on a big hunger strike. And I am going to do it not because I am stubborn, but because I really do not want to leave Cuba, I have never wanted to leave, but it is an option to be able to continue working and doing things. In the worst case, I have always thought of becoming a martyr, having a school named after me, having the San Alejandro school take its name off and name it after Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. If I come out well, if I come out alive, that day will be one of the happiest of my life. I am not going to hate anyone. It will be a reunion with all my friends, with my family, being able to breathe, being able to walk, being free. Let people see the work of these three years, because of course, the only thing I get out of here is with all the work of this time. This confinement has many ways of ending. In that thought of a happy ending is meeting all the people I love, and continuing to work. The great performance is to put myself in a capsule for three days, to get rid of all the hate, all the darkness, tear off all my clothes, and remain with the flag.

P.In the three years you have been in prison, Cuba as a country has deteriorated much more. Do you know that you will probably end up in a worse country?

R.Of course, I am a guy who is concerned about the Cuban reality. I cannot speak to you as I would have spoken to you three years ago because I am a very organic guy, who puts his hand on the ground, who walks through the streets. I am able to see what is happening by looking at people’s faces. I have not been online for three years, I have a visitor once a month. I ask, people around me comment. But that talent that I think I have of walking through the streets and perceiving how Cuban ecosystems work, I have cut that off. I know that it is a reality that is on fire, I know that it is worse, and that is why I know that every day I am more dangerous and that they are not going to let me walk through the Cuban streets. I no longer have the supposed fear that one should have of a prison, of a space like this that I now see as relatively normal, because your body has already adapted to it. They know that I am dangerous, they are not going to kill me because they know that turning me into a martyr is part of my reality. The other thing is that this cycle no longer generates anything for me, as an experience. Before I went to prison and came out of prison, that doesn’t generate anything for me anymore. Now I think that creating contributes more.