WASHINGTON, July 18 (Reuters) – Cuban dissident artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has arrived in the United States after completing a five-year prison sentence, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday.
Rubio did not provide his whereabouts or say when he arrived. A U.S. Embassy official in Havana on Friday confirmed that Otero Alcántara had been granted humanitarian parole and said the embassy was working to support his travel.
Cuban authorities detained Otero Alcántara, co-founder of the opposition San Isidro Movement, in 2021 amidst the largest anti-government protests seen in Cuba in decades. Alcántara, 38, was convicted of offenses including desecration of national symbols, contempt and public disorder, and spent five years in the Guanajay prison near Havana.
“Otero Alcántara’s only ‘crime’ was refusing to stay silent and using his art to demand the basic freedoms everyday Cubans have been denied for almost seven decades,” Rubio said in a statement.
The cases of Otero Alcántara and rapper Maykel Castillo, known as “Osorbo,” who is serving an eight-year prison sentence, have been a recurring source of diplomatic tension between Washington and Havana.
(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Sergio Non and Alistair Bell)
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