Carlos Martiel, “Untitled” (2025), acrylic on cardboard with Cuban cigarette packet papers, from the set up Aponte’s Misplaced Podcast in Coco Fusco’s exhibition I Realized to Swim on Dry Land on the Barcelona Museum of Modern Artwork (courtesy the artist)
The yr 2025 has not been fully unhealthy for Cuba’s most well-known political prisoner, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. He gained a Vaclav Havel Prize from the Human Rights Basis in Norway. His artworks are at present featured in Everlasting Night time, Esthetic Disobedience exhibition of Cuban artwork on the Clark Heart in Montreal, and in addition in my very own exhibition, I Realized to Swim on Dry Land, at present operating on the Barcelona Museum of Modern Artwork (MACBA). However, July 11 marked his fourth yr in a maximum-security jail in Cuba, the place he’s solely allowed to obtain month-to-month visits from his aunt and his son and make temporary telephone calls twice every week. He says that the only factor that mitigates residing in squalid situations is realizing that his artwork is shifting by the world, though he stays unjustly confined. He expects to be launched in 2026, as he had been sentenced to 5 years in jail for allegedly desecrating the Cuban flag in a efficiency and inflicting public dysfunction. Although he stays upbeat throughout our telephone calls, he admits, “It is difficult for me as a suffering prisoner of conscience to feel that I am a pawn in a geopolitical power game.”
Even earlier than Otero Alcántara was incarcerated, Ministry of Tradition officers publicly refused to acknowledge him as an artist, calling him as a substitute an “intruso,” which means one who introduces himself with out authorization to be in a selected area or to interact in a selected exercise. Equally, Cuban authorities repeatedly deny that there are political prisoners within the nation, referring to those that declare that identification as delinquents or widespread criminals. Nonetheless, there’s a historical past of Cuba treating its political prisoners like forex to be exchanged for items and useful worldwide agreements. Probably the most well-known instance of this occurred in 1962 when Fidel Castro exchanged the 1,100 prisoners captured in the course of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 for $53 million in child meals and medication from the Kennedy Administration. Castro additionally agreed to launch 3,600 Cuban political prisoners and ship them to the US in 1978 as a part of the Carter Administration’s effort to enhance relations with Cuba. Jesse Jackson negotiated the discharge of 27 political prisoners and introduced them to the US in 1984, together with 22 People who had been in Cuban prisons.
Coco Fusco, Aponte’s Misplaced Podcast (2025), with contributions by Carlos Martiel, Hamlet Lavastida, Celia Irina González, Nonardo Perea, Raychel Carrión, and Sandra Ceballos (courtesy the Barcelona Museum of Modern Artwork)
In the course of the Chilly Struggle, the US authorities noticed worth in rescuing Cuban political prisoners and transferring them to American soil, the place they might recount their experiences and thereby counter the favorable imaginative and prescient amongst progressives of the Cuban revolution as a liberating drive. For the Cuban authorities, sending these prisoners into exile is a handy method to rid itself of its opposition, and drive residence the message to its residents that there isn’t a room within the revolution for counterrevolutionaries. Within the post-Communist period, the Vatican has assumed a central position as an advocate for Cuban political prisoners. In 2010, the Catholic Church and the Spanish authorities brokered the discharge of 52 Cuban writers and activists who had been arrested and jailed within the Black Spring of 2003. In 2014, the Pope’s discreet urging led to the rapprochement between the Cuban authorities and the Obama Administration, however Otero Alcántara factors out that there are limits to what the Catholic Church can provide. “Prisoners cannot go live in the Vatican, you understand? So, the Pope has to speak to another country willing to receive them.” He continues together with his consideration of the prospects for Cuba’s greater than 1,100 political prisoners, 700 of whom had been arrested in the course of the 2021 protests. “So, let’s say tomorrow we can leave prison. Where do we go? To the same Cuba, or to a compulsory exile?” he asks. “Do we have to live as exiles or in Cuba under the same pressure I was under before my last arrest, or even more pressure because right now I am a little more well-known and mature, and Cuba is getting worse every day? They are not going to allow me back on the streets, and they can throw me out.”
The 2025 Cuban prisoner launch was primarily based on a tenuous settlement and was finally disappointing for human rights activists. A lot of the launched prisoners had not been arrested for political causes, and lots of had already served their sentences in full. The releases had been additionally conditional, and two well-known activists — José Daniel Ferrer and Felix Navarro — had been returned to jail shortly after their launch. “This is a crazy country where everything changes overnight, and there is no security whatsoever,” mentioned Otero Alcántara. “We’re in a loop for now. They put us in prison; they release us; they put us in prison again; they release us.”
Since Donald Trump took workplace in January 2025, his second administration restored Cuba to the listing of nations that sponsor terrorism, terminated bilateral negotiations, intensified the embargo, clamped down on humanitarian parole and immigration, and began deporting Cubans, an unprecedented transfer that shocked many within the exile neighborhood. Two exiled San Isidro Motion members, Eliexer Márquez Duany (El Funky) and Oscar Casanella, have been threatened with deportation from the US. The closure of USAID and the State Division’s pro-democracy applications has additionally resulted within the drastic discount of funding for unbiased media and cultural activists, which has impacted Cuban journalists, photo-journalists, artists, and musicians on the island and all through the diaspora. Concrete assist has all however disappeared regardless of the Trump Administration’s claims that it seeks to foster “a free and democratic Cuba.”
“Right now, it feels like the world has forgotten about us,” says Otero Alcántara.
The artist introduced on July 4 that he had began a symbolic 12-hour per day starvation strike for the next week in homage to all of the Cubans imprisoned within the wake of the July 11, 2021, protest. With the assistance of associates, he’s additionally planning to create a brand new paintings consisting of jars of compote with the faces of Cuban political prisoners at present incarcerated, recalling the period during which their freedom had a worth and a purchaser. “It is worrisome to feel disadvantaged. They feel unprotected by international institutions and countries that have protected us in the past,” displays Otero Alcántara. “By not accepting immigrants, the United States and other countries empower dictatorships to act with impunity.”
