(EFE).- The Cuban artist and dissident Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has started a hunger and thirst strike demanding his freedom from the Guanajay prison, where he is serving a five-year sentence, activist Claudia Genlui reported this Friday.
This is the sixth strike by the leader of the San Isidro Movement, who has been imprisoned in Cuba since July 11, 2021 (July 11), when he tried to join the anti-government protests that broke out that day in the country, the largest in decades.
According to Genlui, an exile in the United States, Otero Alcántara “refuses to accept jail as her fate, refuses to accept the endless bars, the stone beds, the white light that never goes out, the 20 minutes of telephone calls a week , the hyper-monitored monthly family visit”. The 35-year-old opponent is serving a five-year sentence for the crimes of insulting national symbols, public disorder and contempt.
It is not the first time that the artist has adopted this measure, since in April 2021 he was on a hunger and thirst strike for more than five days, for which he was admitted to a hospital in Havana.
Otero Alcántara “refuses to accept jail as his destiny, refuses to accept the endless bars, the stone beds, the white light that never goes out”
Magazine Time listed him among the hundred most influential people of 2021, while Amnesty International considers him a “prisoner of conscience”.
His decision comes a few days before the second anniversary of the 9/11 protests and almost two weeks after the Cuban opponent Guillermo Fariñas also began a hunger and thirst strike that was joined by several members of his formation, the Forum United Antitotalitarian (Fantu).
Fariñas, Sakharov Prize winner from the European Parliament in 2010, resumed this Friday the thirst strike that he had suspended four days ago, while maintaining the hunger strike that began on June 25.
As reported on social networks by Fantu, the dissident took this step because there has been no progress in the conditions he put in place at the start of this strike.
Specifically, Fariñas suspended the thirst strike for four days on Monday while waiting for the European Parliament to approve a motion to request the rupture of the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement (ADPC) that the European Union (EU) has maintained since 2017 and Cuba, one of their four demands at the start of the protest.
The motion, however, will be put to a vote next Tuesday. The Spanish MEP Javier Nart assured Fariñas by telephone this Thursday that the initiative will go ahead because “conservatives, liberals and popular have a majority in the plenary session of the Eurochamber,” said Fantu.
According to the latest health report, Fariñas, 61, suffers “a lot of drowsiness, fatigue, weakness and joint pain.”
According to the latest health report, Fariñas, 61, suffers “a lot of sleepiness, fatigue, weakness and joint pain” and has “sporadic states of alert, where he talks.” In addition to demanding the end of the ADPC from the EU, Fariñas included in his demands to end the hunger strike and seek the “unconditional” release in Cuba of “all political prisoners.”
Likewise, Fariñas urged the Organization of American States (OAS) to impose a “naval and air siege” on Cuba in application of its Inter-American Democratic Charter, although the island is not part of that organization. So far there has been no response to this claim.
Finally, the dissident assured that he would maintain his protest “until all military personnel and their espionage teams currently based in Cuba, belonging to the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, are withdrawn.”
Fariñas, one of the best-known Cuban opponents internationally, told EFE at the beginning of the strike that he was arrested last week at the Santa Clara airport, after an incident due to the loss of his suitcases upon his return from a stay several months in Miami (USA).
This is the 28th hunger strike carried out by Fariñas. The longest, 14 months, was in 2003 and the last one dates from 2016, when he fasted for a hundred days, most of them hospitalized, to ask the Cuban government to release a group of sick imprisoned opponents.
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