The Trump administration has declared atwo-week deadlineon Cuba to release two “high-profile” prisoners,Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel Castillo Pérez (aka Maykel Osorbo), described as dissident artists from the San Isidro movement (Movimiento San Isidro, MSI). Alcántara is described as a performance artist from the El Cerro neighborhood of Havana, while Pérez is known as a musician and author of Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life), a work described as a rallying cry for Cuban dissidents.
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“With provocative performances that have seen its most prominent figures parade through Old Havana waving American flags, and through flagrant displays of contempt for Cuban national symbols, San Isidro has antagonized the authorities, triggering frequent detentions of its members and international campaigns to free them,” writes the journalist and filmmakerMax Blumenthal.
Pérez was arrested in 2021 and convicted of public disorder and crimes against state security. Otero Alcántara was arrested numerous times for performing in violation of Decree 349, a Cuban law mandating artists obtain prior permission for public and private exhibitions and performances. Osorbo was sentenced to nine years in prison and Otero Alcántara received a five year sentence.
“The Cuban State does not recognize the political nature of these convictions and continues to construct common criminal cases to prosecute them and keep them imprisoned,”Anamely Ramos González, an academic curator who worked with Otero Alcántara and Osorbo, told Freedom House.
Freedom House is a US-government funded regime change operationlinked to the CIA.
“Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy stress their commitment to freedom of thought and democracy, but both cooperated with a CIA-organized propaganda operation in the 1980s,” the lateRobert Perryof Consortium News wrote in 2015.
Under the Reagan-Bush administrations, Freedom House advanced the foreign policy objectives of the United States in Central America, including the support of death squads linked to the ARENA party in El Salvador and “championing Contra leaders like Arturo Cruz, and serving as aconduit for fundsfrom the National Endowment for Democracy [NED].”
“the US government has spent millions of dollars to cultivate anti-government Cuban rappers, rock musicians, artists, and journalists in an explicit bid to weaponize ‘desocialized and marginalized youth.’”
Source: Global Research
