- Name: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
- Position: Artist, opposition activist
- Deprived of liberty from: June 11, 2021
- Judgment: 5 years of imprisonment
- Country: Cuba
- Place of confinement: Prison of Guanajay
- Health condition: Severe health conditions
- Torture complaint: Subject to inhumane prison conditions
Alcántara is a Cuban performance artist and dissident, known for his public performances that openly criticize the Cuban government and its totalitarian policies. Since 2018, Alcántara has been arrested dozens of times for his performances and activism.
In November 2020, he participated in a hunger strike as part of the San Isidro Movement. Alcántara and other demonstrators were arrested twice by the police during the protest.
On December 3, 2020, he was released from prison, but was arrested again on the same day when he joined another protest. He was released under house arrest on the same day.
In April 2021, another hunger strike began, which attracted widespread attention and global media coverage. Apparently, state security agents dressed in civilian clothes broke into Alcántara’s house and arrested him and the poet Afrika Queen. The agents also confiscated some of Otero’s most recent works of art.
As part of the demonstrations on July 11, Otero Alcántara was arrested and interned in the Guanajay prison where he began a new hunger strike on September 27, which ended on October 15. On September 15, 2021, Time magazine included him on the list of the hundred most influential people in the world.
Likewise, the MSI denounced that the artist, who has sequels to his previous hunger strike, has received pressure to go into “exile.” He also said that the authorities “do not allow him to socialize with other prisoners, nor go out to the yard to sunbathe.”
Sponsors
Name : Rayma Suprani
Position: Journalist, Cartoonist and activist
Observations
Suprani is a Venezuelan cartoonist. She graduated as a journalist from the Central University of Venezuela and has worked for several newspapers in Caracas. From 1995 to 2014, she published her cartoons daily in one of Venezuela’s most important newspapers, El Universal, when she was fired for the political content of one of her cartoons. In addition, she was threatened many times by her caricatures, so she had to leave Venezuela.
Since then, she has continued to create vignettes almost daily, which she publishes on her website and social networks. She is an artist and her work of art is shown in various formats. She had her first solo exhibition in 2012.
She received the Press Award of the Inter-American Society (2005), the Pedro León Zapata Prize for Best Cartoonist of Venezuela (2000, 2009) and the Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissidency at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2019.
