Cuban dissident artist Otero Alcantara completes three weeks in isolation in a hospital

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Artist and dissident Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), has been in solitary confinement in a Havana hospital for three weeks this Sunday. However, it is not known if he remains there of his own free will.

Otero, 33 years old and declared this week “prisoner of conscience” by Amnesty International, was interned by the authorities in the Calixto Garcia hospital on May 2, after being on hunger and thirst strike for a week to protest the constant harassment he suffers from the authorities and the destruction of several of his works.

Organizations, activists, and friends of the opposition leader have been demanding his release for days. They consider that he is being held against his will in the hospital, where they denounce that a strong security device has been deployed and that his relatives are not allowed access.

Since he arrived at the hospital, the state media have broadcast several videos of Otero Alcántara, all of them without verifiable date and supposedly recorded by the medical team attending him, but which his entourage attributes to the state security.

The last of them was made public this week and showed the artist in a hospital room, looking emaciated and visibly thin, while eating from a tray with his hands. The images contrast with previous recordings, in which he was seen in apparent good health.

“That video shows that Luis is in bad shape, he is thin and listless when talking, it alarmed me a lot to see him like that. I think they recorded on the sly; the video is full of clippings. It is another of the manipulations of state security. Still, this time the image of Luis is what is relevant, you can see how badly he is suffering in there”, said the dancer Chabelly Diaz, Otero’s friend.

For her part, opposition member Ileana Hernandez, close to the MSI, considered that the activist “is in a state of submission” and added that she fears he is being drugged. “His gestures and his way of speaking are very different from his normal state, he does not speak as if he were lucid”, she said.

Several entities and institutions denounced the situation or expressed concern, including Amnesty International – which named him a prisoner of conscience last Friday – Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government, and the European Parliament.

“How is it possible that a patient in a hospital does not have the right to visits or a telephone?” questioned on Twitter this week the U.S. Embassy in Havana, which asked, “that Otero Alcántara and all Cubans be respected and treated with dignity.”

At the same time, six of the activists who demonstrated with dozens of other people in Old Havana on April 30 shouting slogans against the government, a protest that resulted in a dispute with the police, are still under arrest.

According to sources in their entourage, Mary Karla Ares and Thais Franco have been interned in the women’s prison El Guatao; Esteban Rodriguez, Inti Soto and Angel Cuza remain in the Villa Marista state security facilities; and Yuisan Cancio is under arrest in the province of Pinar del Rio.

The April 30 incidents occurred when the activists were about to visit Otero Alcántara, still on hunger and thirst strike, at his home.

Cuban authorities, for their part, consider both Otero Alcántara and other opponents to be “mercenaries” working in the pay of the CIA or other U.S. organizations to carry out subversive activities against the current socialist system.