“If a door were opened to me right now, where I could go out into exile, brother, I go out, do you understand?”. The words of Maykel Castillo Osorb, in a telephone conversation from prison with Armando Labrador, owner of the YouTube channel where the program is broadcast sing it tvsuggest that the artist is willing to leave Cuba in exchange for his release.
The audio was reproduced this Monday in that same space, presented by Esteban Rodríguez, who was accompanied for the occasion by other activists in exile: the curators Anamely Ramos and Carolina Barrero, the actress Iris Ruiz and the protesting rapper Eliexer Márquez. the funky, co-author with Osorbo, Gente de Zona, Yotuel Romero and Descemer Bueno of the song Homeland and Life.
The plan to get Osorbo out of prison – where he is serving a nine-year sentence for contempt, attack, public disorder and “defamation of institutions and organizations, heroes and martyrs” – is part of a “very long process”, in the words of Anamely Ramos, one of the people closest to the artist.
It started when he got sick in jail and they began to fear for their lives. Distrusting the medical tests that were carried out in prison and facing the uncertainty of a lack of diagnosis, Ramos said on Cántalo TV, “it was evident that something had to be done to save Maykel’s life, because we don’t even know what he has.” .
The curator reaffirms to this newspaper that, although he had not spoken publicly, the musician confessed that he was going to leave if he had “the opportunity” when his lymph nodes began to swell
The curator reaffirms to this newspaper that, although he had not spoken publicly, the musician confessed that he was going to leave if he had “the opportunity” when his lymph nodes began to swell. “That’s when Maykel started to get scared,” she says. “Until that moment, Maykel had kept telling me that even if they blackmailed him, he was not going to leave Cuba, that he preferred to be in prison.”
It is precisely the position that Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, leader of the San Isidro Movement (MSI), maintains until now, sentenced in the same case as Osorbo, in his case to five years in prison, for outrage against the symbols of the homeland , contempt and public disorder.
Alcántara has denounced on numerous occasions that State Security, as it did with other opponents, such as the artist Hamlet Lavastidatry to blackmail them with the letter imprisonment for exile, but, in his case, has made it clear by now that he “will not accept banishment as an option under any circumstances”.
Recently, in addition, he denounced via the MSI that Osorbo was involved in the blackmail: if Alcántara did not accept a forced exile agreement, the rapper would also not be able to leave Cuba to be treated for his health problem.
both activists they refused to appeal their convictions last July. In the case of Osorbo, he declared through his friends that “he will no longer lend himself to that circus,” referring to the trial to which they were subjected.
Despite the fact that Maykel Osorbo has already expressed his desire out loud, Anamely Ramos recalls that his release, in any case, depends on the regime. After alluding, without details, to “steps being taken from different countries,” he asserted: “Whether those steps are going to give results or not, we don’t know, because Maykel is in prison in Cuba, sentenced in Cuba. Ultimately, whether they are going to let Maykel out or not, only State Security knows that.”
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