The artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara sent a message to the Cuban regime this Saturday after arriving exiled in the United States: “Just give in already”.
In his first statements on U.S. soil, he made a call full of urgency and emotion directed at both the authorities on the island and Cubans inside and outside the country.
"Please, I swear to you, just give in, because we are talking about situations that are not just about the lack of food," said Otero Alcántara, referring to the leaders of the regime.
"We are talking about millions of people suffering. We are talking about separated families, about people who are here and cannot go there, whose mother is dying, whose father is dying, whose grandmother is dying, and they cannot go back to give one last kiss."
The artist described the situation of those who remain in Cuba as a reality of rupture: people who, he asserts, are trapped in a system that immobilizes them.
"There are so many fractures in Cuba and among exiles, because one thinks that you left for the yuma and that's it, but it's not like that; there is pain here too," he pointed out.
He also spoke of a personal mission that drives him from within. "I will continue to work hard; I have a mission that I don’t know where it came from, but each of us has the necessary tools because we are not only artists and intellectuals, but we are connected to that reality, and we sacrifice all the luxuries of art to fight for a change in that reality," he stated.
In that same tone, he rejected the label of artist or intellectual in the conventional sense: "We are not artists, we are not intellectuals, we are not people who worry about that reality and sacrifice all the drawings they have, the art and so on."
The visual artist and co-founder of the San Isidro Movement, considered the most emblematic political prisoner of Cuba, arrived at Miami International Airport on flight AA2706 from Havana, after five years of imprisonment in Guanajay prison and a release conditional upon his permanent exile from the island.
His release came after a week of anguish for his family. The regime transferred him from Guanajay on July 7 without informing his family, keeping him in an undisclosed location under the custody of State Security, a situation that Amnesty International described as forced disappearance.
His five-year sentence officially expired on July 9, 2026, but the regime did not release him on that date.
Only after the approval of a humanitarian parole by the United States government on Friday, July 17, was he able to leave Cuba, with exile as the only condition.
In January 2022, Otero Alcántara publicly rejected that same option with a phrase that became a symbol: “I will die here”.
However, in an interview with USA Today published in May 2026 from the Guanajay prison, he expressed his willingness to continue his fight from exile.
Otero Alcántara's first act in Miami will be to visit the Ermita de la Caridad del Cobre at 6:30 PM this Saturday, where he will leave an offering of gratitude.
She brought with her from Cuba a broken virgin, an act that the activist Anamely Ramos described as an invitation to "gather the fragments" and "heal" what is broken in Cuba.
The U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, issued a welcoming message for "freedom" upon its arrival.
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