Luis Manuel Otero On What Is Like To be An Artist in Cuba

Democratic Spaces hopes the message conveyed by Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara in this presentation reaches the Canadian government and other democratic governments around the world as Cuban independent artists are calling on cultural promoters and good will individuals to help independent artists in the island promote their work and make them visible. A great way to put the Canadian government “people to people ties” approach in practice starts by reaching out to independent artists in Cuba.

In this video, Cuban contemporary artist and main coordinator of the San Isidro Movement, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara gives a powerful presentation in an important panel on the State of Artistic Freedom in 2021 hosted by Freemuse and as part of the Rewriting the Future Festival live-streamed live from Berlin from February 25-27, 2021.

Luis Manuel effectively conveys what is like to be a contemporary artist in Cuba and what is the human cost of standing up to censorship and persecution of ideas. In a dictatorship at war with reality. He asserts that art in Cuba “is dying” as it cannot reflect or question the reality of misery and oppression. Instead, it has to conform to a doctrine approved by the power elite and the Community Party of Cuba.

If your work or your song or your poem shows the concrete reality in which you live, which is a reality of poverty, a reality of violence … if you show that in your work and that is not precisely what the regime wants to show to the international opinion, it costs you that your family is afraid to talk to you. Imagine that your mom and dad are afraid that you are their son. Imagine that your friend is afraid that you are his friend … your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your partner is affraid of you being their couple.

In his presentation, Luis Manuel shed light and digs deep into the nature of totalitarianism in Cuba by stating that in the island artists not only face censorship but something more sinister as those who successfully reflect reality in his work and connect with people are not only imprisoned or persecuted as in other dictatorships, but socially annihilated by an “entire military and intelligence apparatus.” After 62 years living in one of the top world’s longest lasting dictatorships, new generations of Cubans have lost sense of what claiming rights means. Therefore, Luis Manuel states that Cubans are “born dead.”

And you would say that in other realities in the world, activists, journalists are kidnapped and killed. Here we are born dead. Here don’t know how to claims their rights .. We live as ghosts, we live like the dead, we live like zombies without rights, without knowing that we can choose a decent home, that we can choose to simply live in a world that is not simply what one person says …

In the words of an artist born in one of Habana’s humblest neighbourhoods being a contemporary artist in Cuba has costed him and others alike “prison and even death” and goes on to say that he has been “imprisoned more than 40 times in a jail cell” in retaliation for his depiction of reality in his artwork.

As one of the founders of the San Isidro Movement against censorship in Cuba, Luis Manuel condemned Law Decree 349 which codifies censorship “prevents you as an independent artist to have your own space, to have his/her own voice.”

Luis Manuel concludes his presentation by calling on museums and artistic promoters around the world to move beyond the regime’s propaganda and to acknowledge, communicate and help promote independent artists in Cuba.