It’s been a long slumber, but after more than six decades under the yoke of a socialist tyranny, Cuba may indeed be finally waking up.
“I think all of Cuba is waking up,” says opponent Otero Alcántara
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is the most visible face of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), as well as the collective of artists and intellectuals who have posed the Cuban government the greatest challenge in recent years.
He entrenched himself with 13 other dissidents at his home in the neighborhood of San Isidro to demand the release of amateur rapper Denis Solis, who was sentenced to 8 months in prison for contempt, and went on hunger strike. The police forcibly evicted them all.
This lit the wick of indignation in the culture guild. Last Friday, as Otero Alcántara was recovering in the hospital, more than 300 creators from all branches staged an unprecedented rally in front of the Ministry of Culture in Havana to demand freedom of expression and the cessation of police harassment.
They managed to attract the attention of the world and, something also unprecedented, to open a way of dialogue with the authorities.
“ Luisma,” as his friends call it, left the hospital on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was arrested and released within a few hours. He says they won’t let him return to his home in San Isidro, so he stays with family members in the nearby neighborhood of El Cerro, where he receives Efe this Thursday for this interview.
The government accuses Otero Alcántara and his comrades of receiving US funding to undermine the Revolution and destabilize the country. As evidence, state media released a video in which the artist salutes effusively on the street to Mara Tekach, who was then the US head of diplomatic mission in Havana.
Question: They say he works for the US
Answer: It’s the enemy’s syndrome. What they put you as a label when you question the regime. I don’t work for the US. I’m an independent artist, I live on my art. As a child they tell you “you are mercenary, you work for the CIA,” and you wonder, won’t there be mere mortals who do things out of conviction, because they get tired of MLC stores (in dollars) and the aberrations of all regimes in the world?
Q: Have you ever received money from the US?
A: Not so far. Although I would be willing if a scholarship or foundation wanted to fund me.
Q. The government shows a video of a street meeting between you and then US Chargé d’affaires, Mara Tekach. What was that?
A. She’s a diplomat. I can also meet Mara Tekach as with the French ambassador, my friend from the Dutch embassy or from the EU. As with President (Cuban, Miguel) Diaz-Canel if one day he would like to talk to me.
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Do you have any idea how a young and photogenic black social justice warrior (a real one, in this case) would be lionized BIG time by the Left if he weren’t up against a leftist regime? Sure you do, and so do they.
Sometimes, the hypocrisy, fraudulence and bad faith posturing as righteousness defies belief–though by now that’s so common and “normalized” that I basically expect it.
Lord, the contempt.