More than 300 personalities from the world of culture, some of international renown like Meryl Streep, Orhan Pamuk or Paul Auster, on Wednesday called on the Cuban regime to release “all artists arbitrarily detained” on the island, where creators and intellectuals are at the forefront of the dispute.
“The Cuban government should immediately put an end to the abuses against Cuban artists”, ask notably the writers Isabel Allende, JM Coetzee, Khaled Hosseini or Mario Vargas Llosa, in an open letter published by the NGOs Human Rights Watch and Pen America .
The signatories, who also include Elena Poniatowska, Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, also demand that the Cuban authorities’ charges against the artists be dropped.
On November 27, 2020, some 300 artists demonstrated in Havana to demand greater freedom of expression, a movement that opened the door to a series of social protests in Cuba, until the demonstrations of July 11, the most important since the 1959 revolution.
“In response, the Cuban government has systematically targeted Cuban artists, including recently those who took part in the July 11 protests,” lament the signatories.
“It has in fact been reported that several dozen artists have been arrested and placed in detention or under house arrest”, while others are “subject to constant surveillance” and others have left the country, they believe. .
On November 16, the opposition platform Cuba Decide denounced the arrest of more than 100 people and the house arrest of a hundred activists to prevent them, according to them, from participating in demonstrations.
“Nothing can justify persecuting artists who peacefully express their point of view,” continued the letter published Wednesday.
The more than 300 artists who made the call call on the Communist government to “immediately stop harassing artists whose political and social critiques do not fit into the regime’s rigid ideology.” “
The letter is also signed by Cuban artists like Hamlet Lavastida, forced in September into exile in Europe after being arrested in Cuba in June, accused of “incitement to delinquency” via social networks.