Havana/The Cubalex legal advice center reported that it was able to formally deliver the appeal in Havana. habeas corpus in favor of the artist and political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántarawho until this Tuesday remains missing, after being transferred from prison two days before his five-year sentence expired on July 9.
“The corresponding judicial authorities now have a legal period of 72 hours to issue a response,” said on social networks the organization that had reported the day before about the impediments to delivering the appeal “due to the fact that the Popular Provincial Court of Havana, the body competent to hear the request, as well as the Supreme People’s Court, remained closed this Monday despite it being a working day.”
Cubalex explained that “this legal action occurs in a critical scenario of lack of protection”, since “on July 9, the five-year sentence that the artist had served in the Guanajay prison officially expired since 2021.”
On July 9, the artist’s five-year sentence in Guanajay prison officially expired, starting in 2021.
He also denounced that “despite this, on July 7 he was taken from prison by military and State Security forces to an unknown whereabouts, and since then he has remained without official information about his location.”
“At Cubalex we demand that due process and the physical integrity of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara be respected,” he said.
The first contact that was had with Otero Alcántara, after learning that he was taken from the Guanajay prison, was reported on July 9 by curator Anamely Ramos, who reported on social networks that the artist was “fine,” after having communicated with her from “a Cuban State Security mobile phone.”
Ramos indicated in his publication that State Security agents “wanted to know how the process of the requested parole is going” for Otero Alcántara to travel to the United States and explained that “Luis Manuel’s parole is still in process.”
State Security Agents “wanted to know how the process of the requested conditional release is going” for Otero Alcántara to travel to the United States
In this regard, the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) criticized last week that this seems “a release conditional on exile.”
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, 38 years old and considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was imprisoned for five years in the Guanajay prison from where he had reported multiple abuses on several occasions.
The leader of the San Isidro movement was arrested on July 11, 2021, when he tried to join the massive anti-government protests that day, the largest in decades in Cuba.
Since last week, Amnesty International has demanded the “immediate and unconditional release” of the artist.
