The official propaganda program “Con Filo”, hosted by the regime's spokesperson Michel Torres Corona, dedicated a segment of its broadcast on Tuesday, July 22, to attempting to convince its audience that the artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara left Cuba voluntarily, without pressure or coercion.
The statement, captured in the program aired on YouTube, directly contradicts the documented facts and the artist's own words.
"The fact that Alcántara arrived in Miami without the physical consequences that some had predicted, leaving through Havana airport without violence or coercion, has sparked some controversy and mistrust over there, which we feel it is our duty to highlight," stated Torres Corona on the program, a co-production of Cubadebate, La Pupila Insomne, and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT).
The regime's argument relies on two elements: that Otero Alcántara arrived in Miami in apparent good physical condition and that he was able to take out of prison more than 4,000 paintings.
The program openly mocked both events, insinuating that the claims about the conditions of his imprisonment were exaggerated or fabricated.
What Torres Corona omitted is that the artist himself explained the reason for those paintings with a phrase that dismantles the official narrative: "Because I was dying and they didn't want me dead," Otero Alcántara declared in an interview with Martí Noticias, referring to why the authorities allowed him to paint during the five years of confinement in the maximum-security prison of Guanajay in Artemisa.
The regime's version also contradicts what Otero Alcántara himself declared upon arriving in Miami on July 18 on American Airlines flight AA2706.
"It's important to acknowledge the fact that I have been expelled from Cuba and that this is not right. This is not right," he said in an interview with El Estornudo at the Ermita de la Caridad.
In another interview, he was even more explicit about the nature of his departure: “I was still in custody. They were just taking me to another place”, he stated.
The documented facts reveal a systematic pattern of coercion.
On July 7, two days before his sentence was officially set to expire, State Security agents took Otero Alcántara from Guanajay without notifying his family and transferred him to a house near Guanabo, where he was held in custody with all his conversations recorded.
For days, his whereabouts were unknown, a situation that Amnesty International described as enforced disappearance and that prompted the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances to activate the Urgent Action AU No. 2357/2026.
The condition imposed by the regime for him to regain his freedom was a single one: to leave Cuba permanently and irrevocably, despite having fully served his five-year sentence.
State Security did not take him to the airport until the last moment, when the flight was already confirmed, and they led him directly to the aircraft without passing through the usual checks, as Anamely Ramos reported in a live broadcast.
This was not the first time the regime had offered him exile as the only way out. In January 2022, when he received that same proposal, he rejected it with the phrase, "I will die here."
Four years later, after five years of imprisonment, hunger strikes, and documented death threats, he was expelled with no possibility of return.
Torres Corona closed the segment with a phrase that summarizes the tone of the program: "It's quite a show; well, we have to live off something. Alcántara knows it, Pentón knows it, and Marco Rubio knows it, even the current emperor."
Otero Alcántara, for his part, responded with a different rationale: "We will keep working, and we won't waste a minute, because every minute we lose is another minute of dictatorship."
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