The official propaganda program “Con Filo”, hosted by the regime 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 any 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 repercussions that some had predicted, leaving the Havana airport without violence or coercion, has sparked some controversy and suspicion over there, which we feel it is our duty to highlight," Torres Corona stated on the program, a co-production of Cubadebate, La Pupila Insomne, and the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT).
The regime's argument is based 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, suggesting that the claims about the conditions of their 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 incarceration in the maximum-security prison of Guanajay, in Artemisa.
The regime's version also directly contradicts what Otero Alcántara himself declared upon arriving in Miami on July 18 on American Airlines flight AA2706.
"It is important to see the fact that I am expelled from Cuba and the fact 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 formally ended, 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 being recorded.
For days, his whereabouts were unknown, a situation that Amnesty International described as enforced disappearance and which led 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 simple 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 very last moment, when the flight was already confirmed, and took him directly to the aircraft without going through the usual checks, as Anamely Ramos recounted in a live transmission.
It wasn’t the first time the regime offered him exile as the only way out. In January 2022, when he received that same proposal, he rejected it with the phrase "I would rather die here."
Four years later, after five years in prison, hunger strikes, and documented death threats, he was expelled with no possibility of return.
Torres Corona closed the segment with a phrase that sums up the tone of the program: "It's all a show, well, one has to make a living. Alcántara knows it, Pentón knows it, and so do Marco Rubio and even the current emperor."
Otero Alcántara, for his part, responded with a different rationale: “We are going to keep working and we won’t waste a minute, because every minute we lose is another minute of dictatorship.”
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