(no subject)

holy shit

When news of Osorbo’s abduction spread, the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Osorbo’s wife, and a handful of other supporters went to the police station to demand the rapper’s release. “We told the officers that we wouldn’t leave until Maykel was freed, even if we had to sleep in jail, too,” Alcántara told me. But officers eventually apprehended these supporters, too, and dispersed them to other facilities, in distant parts of the city. At midnight, Osorbo was released. There is no official record of his arrest or detention, and international human-rights organizations didn’t have enough time to respond—a pattern that has become part of the Cuban government’s new playbook for suppressing dissent.

For Osorbo, this kind of episode has become a recurring cost of doing business as an artist. He offers cutting commentary about street problems in Cuba, state censorship, patriotism, poverty, and repression—topics that make the government uncomfortable. In, 2018, he hosted an impromptu hip-hop concert in a small cultural center called La Madriguera, located on Infanta avenue, in the heart of Havana. The space has long been a popular venue for both the capital’s alternative music scene, while also serving a state-sponsored group for young artists and writers, the Associatión Hermanos Saíz. When Osorbo took the stage that night, he reportedly provoked an intense and euphoric reaction. At one point, he and other rappers denounced the recent arrest of another young dissident musician, and yelled repeatedly, “¡No al Decreto 349! ¡No al 349!” Three days later, La Madriguera was closed down, and Osorbo was arrested and imprisoned. He didn’t get out until October 2019.

Decreto 349—Decree 349—is a 2018 Cuban law that allows the state to “regulate” anyone who engages in artistic activities. The category of “official” artist was reserved for those who graduated from state schools or are affiliated with government cultural institutions. Employers who failed to procure the Ministry of Culture’s authorization before hiring an artist could be harshly sanctioned. Amnesty International described the decree as a “dystopian prospect for Cuban artists.”

- Cuba's Doomed War on Independent Art