The artist and activist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara posted a video on his Facebook account in which he recounts, with a mixture of indignation and restrained emotion, what he experienced during the act of repudiation led by Cuban diplomats at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and he connects it directly to the repression he himself suffered in Cuba beforebeing imprisoned.
The founder of the San Isidro Movement, who has been in the United States for just three months after being expelled from Cuba in July 2026 after serving five years in prison, described the moment when he entered the forum "Cuba Libre: The Oppression That Havana Hides" — organized by the U.S. ambassador Mike Waltz on October 19 — and encountered a crowd shouting that he initially did not recognize as a repudiation act.
“At the moment, I realize that it is a rally of repudiation that is being held against us in the United States,” he recounted.
What followed was a visceral reaction: his body transported him back to Havana, to the acts of harassment he himself had endured for years before ending up behind bars.
"Imagine those people roaming freely in Havana. Imagine those individuals having the complete freedom to enter your home, even to hit you, to break everything they can, because you are not protected in Havana," he said, addressing both the Cuban people and the international institutions present at the forum.
That difference —the security she felt at the UN compared to the total lack of protection for activists on the island— is the core of her reflection. "They can't do anything right now, we are here in the place of freedom," she thought at that moment. But immediately came the other side: "Imagine living that completely unprotected in the mouth of the beast. And just like the beast bites you, crushes you, spits you out again, chews you up once more, breaks your bones with impunity."
Otero does not speak in abstract terms. Before being arrested on July 11, 2021, and sentenced to five years in prison, he suffered more than 90 arbitrary detentions in less than three years, state-organized acts of repudiation, home raids, and hunger strikes. Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience, and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention deemed his imprisonment arbitrary.
The act of repudiation at the UN was led by the Cuban delegation headed by Ernesto Soberón Guzmán, who shouted "terrorists," "liars," and "get the terrorists out of the UN" at the end of the forum. Ambassador Waltz publicly denounced it as "a mob of diplomats from the Cuban regime at the UN harassing former political prisoners."
The regime's response was swift. The chancellor Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla called Otero a "criminal" and a "circus performer" during a press conference, even questioning his artistic background. Otero did not respond to the insults but instead used them as an argument: "Those same individuals who accuse us of being vulgar, of being hoodlums, as they say, behave that way at the UN."
For the artist, the episode holds a value that goes beyond the diplomatic scandal: it is a sign of desperation from the regime and, at the same time, a message of encouragement for those who resist within Cuba. "What we experienced at the UN is a reflection of how ugly and horrible the Cuban dictatorship is," he concluded.
The annual voting at the UN on the Cuban resolution against the embargo was scheduled for October 27 and 28, in a context where support for that resolution has declined from 187 votes in 2024 to 136 in the extraordinary session of July 2026.
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