‘Cuba’s authorities have stolen my youth just for speaking my mind’ | Opinion
I am an artist and a political prisoner in Cuba. I was arrested on July 11, 2021, on my way to a protest in which thousands of my compatriots rose up across the island to demand freedom.
I’ve been imprisoned ever since.
Last year, I was sentenced to five years in prison on charges of contempt and insult to national symbols, because I used the Cuban flag in a performance in August 2019. This is how the Cuban government views my art. I was tried, alongside my dear friend, the Grammy Award-winning rapper Maykel Castillo — known as El Osorbo — who is now serving a nine-year sentence for similar offenses.
My imprisonment is a result of the Cuban authorities’ systematic strategy to silence the voices of young people. They have been harassing me for years, arresting me 50 times between 2017 and 2021 and also through defamation, violation of privacy, threats and police beatings. But it wasn’t until the historic protest of 2021 that the regime decided to lock me up for a longer period of time so I could no longer communicate with my people.
I’m imprisoned in Guanajay, a maximum-security penitentiary southwest of Havana. Many of my fellow prisoners are serving life sentences for murder. The authorities have separated me from other political prisoners. I share a cell with three others. I’m allowed to talk to other inmates in the hallway, but I’m only taken out to the yard when other prisoners are gone. I should be allowed to spend an hour outside every day, but I’m only let out occasionally at the whim of the guards.
I’ve lost weight because of the scarcity of food and poor quality of meals. I’m often afraid to eat because the food looks rotten. After I was sentenced in June 2022, the rules for visiting me changed. Now my family can only visit me once a month, instead of twice. No one else is allowed. Even my beloved uncle is banned because of his involvement in activism.
More than 1,800 Cubans, mostly young and Black, were arrested in the protests in 2021. Of these, 897 have been tried, and 777 remain in prison. Many are minors. Some have been sentenced to up to 30 years for sedition. But there’s no evidence that the protest was premeditated. It started in a small town outside Havana, when a young boy posted a video on Facebook of people protesting power outages. Within hours, thousands of Cubans decided to take to the streets.
Since that day, hundreds of young Cubans have been trapped behind bars. Every day is the same. Violence is constant. Only one’s body changes. Your hair falls out and your face ages prematurely from pain, frustration and sadness. Your friends leave the country. Lovers’ caresses are long gone. The soundscape here is always the same. All you hear is the murmur of death slowly approaching. In these harsh conditions, human beings are stripped of their youth. They wander the four square meters of their cells with no sense of future.
I speak as a young man in today’s Cuba. We are full of energy and confidence, determined to lend our talents to the quest for a truly democratic and free Cuba. The regime that has survived for 64 years on the Caribbean’s largest island is once again trying to crush a generation, just as it crushed and erased those who preceded us.
Today every young Cuban is a political prisoner. A censored artist. An exile inside and outside Cuba. Even if you’re an accomplice of the system, you will inevitably be crushed like the others, because to be young is to be daring and reckless, eager to bring change to the world. It means fighting for love, dreams and utopia. But these qualities are considered crimes in Cuba, and that condemns us all to martyrdom.
Today, as I approach the age of 35 behind bars, I reflect on the loss of youth under a dictatorial system. Forced to survive political violence, we all lose 90% of our physical and intellectual productivity. Only 10% is left for creative and life-affirming pursuits.
On behalf of the young Cubans locked up in the island’s horrible prisons, I appeal to people of conscience around the world to support our struggle to liberate ourselves and our country. All we did was demand the right to choose our political future and to speak our minds.
No one should have to give up their youth for such a just cause.
Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has been imprisoned since the July 11 protests in 2021.
