Madrid Spain.- The Florida Democratic Party denounced the prison sentences against Cuban artivists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara (LMOA) and Maykel Castillo (“El Osorbo”).
The president of the Democratic Party of Florida and former mayor of Miami, Manny Díaz, described as false the trials against the opponents, held on May 30 and 31, 2022 in the People’s Municipal Court of Central Havana.
Regarding the sentences, he expressed: “Another heinous crime of the Cuban regime.”
Manny Díaz, born in Havana, pointed out that with these sentences the Government “seeks to silence the voices that demand the freedom of the eleven million Cubans who have lived under a crude dictatorship in the last sixty years.”
According to the EFE agency, Díaz recalled that Luis Manuel Otero and Maykel Castillo confronted the Cuban regime “in the name of the young people and children who are not allowed to fulfill their dreams, by the Cubans on the island and those of the Cuban diaspora suffering separation from their families”.
After making known this Friday the sentence against the opponents (five years in prison for LMOA and nine for Maykel Castillo), the spokesman for the Department of State of the northern nation, Ned Price, stated through Twitter: “USA. is outraged by the unfair sentences of Cuban artists”, the authorities must “release these artists and all those detained simply for exercising their right to freedom of expression”.
Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and imprisoned since July 11, was found guilty of the crimes of “outrage against the symbols of the country, contempt and public disorder.”
While “El Osorbo”, imprisoned for more than a year, was convicted of “disrespect, attack, public disorder and defamation of institutions and organizations, heroes and martyrs.”
The Cuban Regime tried present Otero Alcántara and Castillo Pérez as common criminals and not as political prisoners.
In a report on the Nocidero de Televisión del Mediodía, the journalist Gisela García Rivero, citing the Prosecutor’s Office, said that LMOA was not being judged “for her status as an artist or for her political ideas, but for the rejection and manifest indignation of the witnesses before what they considered disrespectful and denigrating use of the national flag in the photos that Alcántara spread between 2019 and 2020.
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