MIAMI — Cuban dissident and Grammy-winning musical artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara arrived in Miami on Saturday after being released from a five-year prison sentence on condition that he leave his country.
Alcántara, 38, was greeted at the airport by a crowd that was cheering, singing and holding their phones high in the air to get a photo of him. They draped him in a Cuban flag, printed with the words “Patria y Vida” — Homeland and Life — the title of a song he shared a Grammy for that became an anthem for Cuba’s political opposition against repression.
The United States granted him parole into the country last week, according to a social media page maintained by his friends and supporters. They wrote that he accepted exile as the only way to escape persecution and continue his art and activism.
Alcántara co-founded a group of Havana artists, writers and musicians called the San Isidro Movement, named for the neighborhood where Alcántara lived.
He was arrested July 11, 2021, during a public protest. In 2022, a court sentenced him to five years in prison for public disorder, contempt and disrespect toward national symbols.
His arrest and incarceration had long been denounced by human rights organizations and the U.S. government. Groups including Amnesty International called him a political prisoner, a designation the Cuban government rejected.
Alcántara was held in a maximum-security prison, he said, and was expected to be released earlier this month. But for days, advocates said they still could not contact him and did not know where he was.
The organization Cubalex, which legally advises dissidents and reports human rights violations from outside of the country, filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf Monday.
Until he boarded a plane Saturday, his advocates were unsure of his location or whether he truly had been released.
His said his first stop on American soil would be at the National Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami to make an offering.
Other political prisoners remained behind bars in Cuba, including his fellow artist Maykel “Osorbo” Castillo Pérez, his advocates said, and they hoped Alcántara’s release would lead to Pérez also being freed.
Alcántara brought from Cuba a broken statue of the Virgin Mary, which he described as a symbol of hope and healing, a chance to put back together something from fragments.
