14ymedio, Havana, 8 February 2024 — The Provincial Court of Artemisa rejected an application for parole for the Cuban artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, as revealed on Wednesday by art curator Claudia Genlui on her social networks.
The leader of the San Isidro Movement was imprisoned in July 2021 and sentenced in June 2022 to five years in prison for the crimes of insulting the symbols of the homeland, contempt and public disorder. Despite the fact that he was not legally eligible to apply for parole, the reason, according to Genlui, is not related to those regulations.
According to the resolution, “The purposes of the penalty have not been achieved, and he is not in a position to face social reintegration in a positive way before family and society. The maximum penalty, having to remain in prison, applies for crimes under Instruction 273 of the Council of Government of the Popular Supreme Court.”
In this sanction, “the purposes of the sentence have not been achieved, and he is not in a position to face social reintegration in a positive way before family and society”
Genlui, the artist’s partner and one of his main spokespersons since he entered prison, said that Otero Alcántara’s family and friends will continue to denounce the violence of the system, which never ceases to intimidate citizens. “Those who are not in a position to face society or their own relatives are all the Castro judges, prosecutors and military who are part of the fascist and macabre game of the dictatorship,” she wrote.
The law specifies that any prisoner who has served a third of his sentence, in the case of children under 2