“Despite not having the physical letters, in that moment of anguish, the energy and love of everyone reached me behind the bars.”
EFE (via 14ymedio), Pablo Urbón, Miami / Cuban artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara received over 27,000 letters and messages of support on Tuesday in Miami, Florida, from Amnesty International (AI). These messages, sent to him by people from around the world during his five years imprisoned in Cuba, were presented to him at an event called Letters of Freedom and Solidarity held at El Espacio 23, the Miami art center where the Cuban artist is an artist-in-residence until September, having arrived in the U.S. city as an exile on July 18.
“Despite not having the physical letters, in that moment of anguish, everyone’s energy and love reached me behind bars. They nourished my heart and kept me believing that a better future is possible,” the artist wrote in his reply, dated August 22, which he read to the audience. “I thank you all for so much love; you saved my life,” he affirmed.
The letters and postcards come from Escribe por los Derechos [Write for Rights], Amnesty International’s annual campaign through which it selects a dozen cases in need of global solidarity. Otero Alcántara was one of those chosen in 2022, when he was serving a sentence on the island, and the organization declared him a prisoner of conscience.
“A letter may seem like a small thing, a simple gesture, but when a person is unjustly imprisoned, a letter can mean much more than a piece of paper.”
“A letter may seem like a small thing, a simple gesture, but when a person is unjustly imprisoned, a letter can mean much more than a piece of paper,” said Amnesty International’s Deputy Director of Research for the Americas, Astrid Valencia, who delivered the letters along with two colleagues from the organization.
“Each letter represents a person who decided to reaffirm the dignity, who decided to refuse to accept injustice as normal,” he added.
In prison, the artist recounted, inmates keep letters for years and reread them again and again. “Giving a photo, giving a letter, writing something by hand meant a reaffirmation of concern from one person to another,” he explained. It was, he added, a pact of friendship in a place where no one is anyone’s friend.
“I was literally convinced that if the artworks didn’t leave, I wouldn’t leave either,” he said, referring to the drawings he made in his cell and couldn’t take out: he would describe them over the phone to artist friends, who would interpret them on the outside. That exercise in communication and resistance, he said, was the true work.
As a token of gratitude, he gave AI a drawing of a door he made in prison, one of the ways, he explained, of seeking a way out: “they are light within the darkness,” Otero concluded, referring to the organization.
Otero Alcántara, co-founder in 2018 of the San Isidro Movement, a collective of artists and intellectuals against cultural censorship in Cuba, arrived in Miami after being released from prison on the condition that he abandon the Island.
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