‘I spent five years with criminals’: dissident Cuban artist embraces new life in US after prison release
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara tells of the reality of prison, drinking whisky with his captors, and being painted by George W Bush When Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara was pushed into the back of a police car on 11 July 2021, during the biggest protests Cuba had seen in nearly three decades, he expected to be in custody for “one, maybe two days”. Instead five years would pass before he was free, and only then after he’d agreed to exile.
“I remember that Sunday,” he says as he opens a beer in El Espacio 23, an art gallery in the Allapattah neighbourhood of Miami. “I was at my girlfriend’s. Friends started writing to tell me there were demonstrations in the streets. It felt like the day we all longed for had arrived – the end of the dictatorship – and I went out into the street.”
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The GuardianSource headline and summary supplied via NewsData.io. First collected by NewsJaws on 2026-10-18. This is an automated news brief, not original NewsJaws reporting. Dates reflect the source publication. Feed delays may apply.