Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara unrolled this Tuesday, in front of curators, collectors, and museum directors gathered at El Espacio 23 in Miami, the paintings and drawings he produced during his five years of political imprisonment in Cuba, in what witnesses described as “an act of historical unveiling.”
The artist and activist, co-founder of the San Isidro Movement, arrived exiled in Miami on July 18 after serving his sentence in the maximum-security prison of Guanajay, Artemisa, and was forced by the regime to leave Cuba permanently.
Otero Alcántara claims that he managed to remove approximately 4,000 paintings and drawings from the island, which he had toroll up and pack into suitcases and bags with the help of other prisoners before being transferred out of the prison.
The works, created on paper, cardstock, kraft paper, and notebook sheets, explore prison culture, the psychology of inmates, dreams, and the complexity of human relationships in confinement. Notable visual elements include expressionist portraits, architectural spaces with bars, time-marking tally marks, figures on stretchers, and representations of puppets.
During the event, Otero Alcántara shared anecdotes and concepts about each piece while a team of specialists packaged the works in front of the attendees for their preservation and restoration.
Not all of his prison works could be rescued. The artist himself reported on social media that the Cuban State Security confiscated and censored a significant number of pieces due to their political or sexual themes, and that many works made with precarious materials were left confiscated in prison.
"After five years of seeing only around thirty people, with limited colors and sounds, I arrive at a space of freedom. I wanted to share the act of revealing my works for the first time because each of these pieces is a deep experience of pain but also of resistance. And above all, it is an act of responsibility towards my brothers who were left behind," Otero Alcántara expressed on Instagram.
The writer Esteban Rodríguez Annetta, present at the event, summarized the significance of what was displayed. “Perhaps some see these works merely as drawings or paintings. I see them as documents of a stage you should have never lived through. They are pieces of memory that came out with you from that prison.”
The regime's confiscation of his work has precedents prior to his imprisonment. In April 2021, State Security agents had already stolen pieces such as El garrote vil and posters from the Caramelos sin salida series.
Otero Alcántara was detained on July 11, 2021, the same day as the historic outbreak of popular protests on 11J. After serving his sentence, he remained missing for several days, a situation that Amnesty International described as "enforced disappearance."
Espacio 23 is a cultural institution in Miami associated with collector Jorge Pérez. Before Otero Alcántara set foot on U.S. soil, exhibitions of his works had already been organized in Miami and at the Gallery of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City.
Omni Luis Eligio XII, whose real name is Eligio Pérez Meriño, was one of the chroniclers of the event, placing the work of the Cuban artist and activist within a tradition of resistance that includes José Martí, Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Reinaldo Arenas, Ángel Delgado, and Danilo Maldonado. “Creating from captivity and documenting the shadow of prison is taking the narrative away from the oppressor,” he expressed.
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