MIAMI, United States. “USA. is outraged by the unjust sentences of Cuban artists Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Maykel ‘Osorbo’ Castillo”, tweeted Ned Price, spokesman for the US State Department.
The US official also said that Cuban authorities should release “these artists and all those detained simply for exercising their right to freedom of expression.”
This Friday, the Attorney General’s Office made it known that Otero Alcántara had been sentenced to five years in prison for the crimes of outrage against the symbols of the country, contempt and public disorder.
Meanwhile, Maykel Castillo Pérez (Maykel Osorbo) was sentenced to nine years in prison for the crimes of contempt, attack, public disorder and defamation of institutions, organizations, heroes and martyrs.
After announcing the convictions of both artists, the regime tried to 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 Otero Alcántara was not judged “for his status as an artist or for his political ideas, but for the rejection and manifest indignation of the witnesses before what they considered disrespectful and degrading use of the national flag in the photos that Alcántara spread between 2019 and 2020.
Likewise, the spokeswoman for the regime assured that the events involving the five citizens tried on May 30 and 31 were not crimes against State Security. “They classify as common crimes and threaten social order, citizen tranquility, respect for institutions and the nation’s jurisdiction.”
In addition to Otero Alcánatara and Castillo Pérez, the last two days of May 2022, Félix Roque Delgado, Juslid Justiz Lazo and Reina Sierra Duvergel were tried for the alleged crimes of outrage against the symbols of the country, contempt, defamation of institutions and organizations and of the heroes and martyrs, attack, resistance and public disorder.
In an article published this Saturday on the Cubalex website, the lawyer Giselle Morfi considered that the motivation for the conviction of Otero Alcántara and Castillo Pérez “was the criminal policy of the State to achieve a deterrent effect, to prevent the rest of society, out of fear , express yourself freely. From there we see the great danger of this sentence, with an evident exemplary effect. The assessment was completely subjective, discretionary and with a completely illegitimate purpose that promotes a culture of self-censorship.
“The result of this and all the sentences against the 11J protesters represent an impact not only individually for the accused, but for the whole society,” he said.
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