Havana/The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has demanded that investigations be carried out “to clarify and determine responsibilities” for the abuses against the rapper. Maykel Castillo Osorboimprisoned in Cuba since 2021. Through a report, in which it analyzes the artist’s case, the organization also asks for comprehensive reparation for the human rights violations that he has suffered.
The document, signed last December and made public this Tuesday by the legal advice center Cubalex, is the response to a request from the NGO made more than seven years ago, on October 4, 2018. In it, it explained the case of the artist, then recently detained in his own home and accused of the crime of “attack.” That arrest occurred three days after organizing a concert at La Madriguera, headquarters of the Hermanos Saíz Association, where, together with other artists, Osorbo spoke out against Decree 349, which criminalizes independent art in Cuba.
The artist received a sentence of a year and a half in prison for that, although he was released from prison in October 2019 and finished serving his sentence a month later in freedom. This is, therefore, a different case than the one that led him to prison in 2021, where he remains.
The Commission indicates that it documented the “arrests, threats, harassment and acts of violence” against Maykel Castillo
In its analysis, the Commission indicates that it documented the “arrests, threats, harassment and acts of violence” against Maykel Castillo and calls for “immediately ceasing all types of persecution against Maykel Castillo, in particular, acts of harassment, bullying and attacks,” and “arranging the physical and mental health care measures necessary for the rehabilitation” of the rapper.
As Cubalex recalls, the artist today finds himself in a situation of risk after having been the victim of an arbitrary transfer and remaining under harassment, without clear official information or verifiable guarantees about his integrity. On January 29, he was suddenly removed from the Kilo 5 y Medio prison, in Pinar del Río, where he had been held since 2021, without any explanation being offered to his family. Although the legal NGO confirmed the next day that he returned to the same prison, he reported that during the transfer he was stripped of his medications and his only coat in the midst of a sharp drop in temperatures, which is why he suffered from flu and fever, which aggravates the risks to his health.
Although it makes no reference to this situation because the subject of the petition dated back to 2018, the IACHR report uses the case of Osorbo to denounce that, “for more than three decades,” in Cuba there has been “a marked intolerance in relation to artistic manifestations.”
“For more than three decades,” in Cuba there has been “a marked intolerance in relation to artistic manifestations”
The organization points out that the repression against the rapper is framed “in a context where independent artists are victims of repression by the Cuban State, an aspect that has intensified since 2017 with restrictions on the use of public spaces and regulations that limit artistic creation.”
Given this, the Commission says that the “creative potential of art also depends on respect for freedom of expression. In its analysis it points out that “the right to artistic or symbolic expression, to the dissemination of artistic expression, and to access to art, in all its forms, is one of the forms of expression specifically protected by the inter-American instruments.”
The IACHR also maintains that art can be constituted as a form of protest. He adds that “the use of the imaginary and fiction must be understood and respected as an essential element of the freedom indispensable for creative activity,” and reaffirms that it should not be restricted with the aim of protecting particular institutions or abstract notions, concepts or beliefs such as national symbols.”
Osorboone of the authors of the emblematic song Homeland and Lifea song that became a symbol of protest in Cuba and for which he won two Latin Grammy Awards that he was never able to collect, is serving a sentence of nine years in prison for contempt, attack, public disorder and “defamation of institutions and organizations, heroes and martyrs” since May 2022, although then he had already been in prison for 13 months – since April 2021 – which is deducted from the sentence. In the same process, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was sentenced to five years.
He is serving a nine-year prison sentence for contempt, attack, public disorder and “defamation of institutions”
The two of them are part of the 1,207 political prisoners on the Island, which is a record, according to the most recent report published by Prisoners Defenders last February 5. Of them, 436 are seriously ill and 42 suffer from mental disorders without receiving medication.
Although the rapper has been open on several occasions to the possibility of being released on condition of forced exile, the option has not prospered. Nor was he released during the process agreed upon with the mediation of Pope Francis by which more than 500 peopleof whom less than half were political prisoners, were released from prison, according to the Government “for the Jubilee year.”
