The Cuban pro-democracy group Cuba Decide confirmed the disappearance or arrest of 57 people since protests erupted throughout the island on Sunday night, many of them prominent critics of the communist regime.
Communist Party police in Cuba arrested Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the head of the San Isidro Movement of pro-democracy artists, on Wednesday morning, less than 24 hours after freeing him from a prior detention.
A rare protest attracting an estimated 300 people in front of Cuba’s Ministry of Culture this weekend prompted police violence, dissidents said, including the use of tear gas and/or pepper spray in the dead of night.
Communist regime agents dressed in lab coats violently raided the headquarters of the San Isidro Movement, a pro-democracy artistic collective in Havana, late Thursday, attacking a group of dissidents, most of whom have spent over a week on a hunger strike.
Pro-democracy dissidents in Cuba condemned the island’s “accredited journalists” — reporters from mainstream media outlets with Communist Party permission to work — for their silence in the wake of an increasingly violent wave of repression, the Spain-based Diario de Cuba reported on Tuesday.
Cuban police reportedly freed dissident artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara on Thursday afternoon after he went missing Monday, shortly before the arrival of King Felipe VI of Spain and wife Queen Letizia.