Cuban rapper Matos MC K-Libre has lost 70 pounds in prison and still has no trial date, relative says

Andrés Matos Alcántara, the 40-year-old Cuban rapper known as Matos MC K-Libre, has lost 70 pounds (about 32 kilograms) since he was jailed more than four months ago, a close relative told Cubanos por el Mundo on Sunday.

Matos remains in pretrial detention, charged with public disorder over the protests against blackouts in the Barbosa neighborhood of Playa, in Havana. “He still has no trial date, no indictment from the prosecutor, no evidence,” the relative wrote.

The family sent Cubanos por el Mundo the rapper’s medical certificate, dated Sept. 16, and three filings his lawyer submitted to prosecutors between July and September asking that he be allowed to await trial outside prison. “Every appeal the lawyer has filed has been denied,” the relative said.

The relative asked for help making the case public but cannot appear on camera: they live in Cuba and support the rapper from the outside. For their safety, and at their request, Cubanos por el Mundo is not disclosing their identity or their exact relationship to him. The relative also wanted to make one thing clear: “Matos does not belong to any organization, and nobody funds him.”

What his medical certificate says

The document, issued by a Havana polyclinic, lists four diagnoses: chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), stage 2 hypertension with target-organ damage, type 2 diabetes and class II obesity.

To manage them, the doctor prescribed metformin three times a day, a fluticasone inhaler, nebulized salbutamol and ipratropium bromide four times a day, theophylline every eight hours and prednisolone during flare-ups.

A summary of his medical history fills in the picture. Coughing fits made him faint and fall several times, and one fall left him with broken ribs. He has had repeated bouts of pneumonia. High blood pressure has already damaged his heart and retinas, and his diabetes was discovered when he was hospitalized and put on insulin.

The doctor also prescribes a strict sugar-free diet spread over six meals a day and says he should avoid overcrowding, humidity, sudden changes in weather and prolonged stress. He warns that the treatment must not be interrupted.

Three defense filings, none accepted

The lawyer, from a Havana law collective, first asked on July 2 that pretrial detention be replaced with a measure that would not keep Matos behind bars. The prosecutor overseeing the case refused, arguing that the grounds for detaining him had not changed, as Cubanos por el Mundo reported at the time (in Spanish).

On July 24 the defense filed a complaint with the chief prosecutor. On Sept. 13 it tried again, this time attaching his medical records as proof that his chronic illnesses had worsened in jail. According to the family, every one of those requests was turned down.

In the filings, the defense denies that Matos organized the protest. Its account is that the rapper was on his way home, came across the demonstration over blackouts and water shortages, joined in the chanting and left when smoke from the street bonfires made it hard for him to breathe. It says he did not attack anyone or damage any property.

The September filing makes one more point: according to the lawyer, the only evidence tying Matos to the events is his own statement to the investigator, and none of the other defendants identifies him as an organizer.

Those are the defense’s arguments. Cubanos por el Mundo has not had access to the full case file or to the investigators’ position, and found no official statement on the case. Under Cuban criminal procedure, the petición fiscal is the document in which prosecutors formally bring charges and state the sentence they are seeking; without it, a case cannot go to trial.

From a police summons to Prison 1580

Police arrested him on June 25 at the Siboney station, where he had been summoned. After the arrest, officers told the family they considered him the leader of the protests and pot-banging in Barbosa, his family said in the days after his detention (in Spanish).

He was held at the police station at Third and 110th streets and then at Valle Grande prison. In mid-September he was moved to Prison 1580 without the family being officially notified, according to an alert from the Cultural Rights Observatory (ODC), which called for his immediate release.

His rap is openly critical of Cuba’s system of government. In July he managed to get a handwritten letter out of prison reaffirming that stance, and by September his family had reported spikes in his blood pressure and other health problems behind bars (both in Spanish). His case comes as a human rights observatory counted at least 387 acts of repression in Cuba in October.

A video calling for his release

On Sunday, cartoonist Benny the Artist, a friend of the rapper, posted a video on Instagram demanding his release. In it, he says Matos “used to be sturdy,” goes over his illnesses and argues that he is being prosecuted “simply for making songs.”

View this post by Benny the Artist (@benny_the_artist) on Instagram

What we know so far

• Andrés Matos Alcántara, known as Matos MC K-Libre, has been in custody since June 25, 2026.
• He is charged with public disorder over the Barbosa protests in Playa, Havana. His family and his lawyer deny that he organized them.
• He remains in pretrial detention. The defense filed at least three requests to change that measure; according to the family, all were denied.
• He has no trial date and no formal indictment, according to his family.
• He has lost 70 pounds in prison, according to his family.
• A Sept. 16 medical certificate diagnoses him with COPD, stage 2 hypertension, type 2 diabetes and class II obesity.
• It remains unknown what prosecutors say about the case and whether he is receiving the treatment and diet his doctor prescribed.

If you have information about the Matos MC K-Libre case or spot an error in this story, write to Cubanos por el Mundo at info@cubanosporelmundo.com.

How we reported this story. A close relative of Andrés Matos Alcántara, whose identity we are protecting for their safety, sent Cubanos por el Mundo his medical certificate, a summary of his medical history and three filings his lawyer submitted to prosecutors, via WhatsApp. While writing, we put our questions and doubts about each claim to the relative and asked them to back up every point of the complaint with documents and names. Many of those names and details are not published, to protect the people involved from possible reprisals by Cuba’s political police.

We read the documents in full, blacked out personal details and the doctor’s information on the certificate, and checked the dates against our earlier coverage and the Cultural Rights Observatory’s alerts. Quotes were translated from Spanish by Cubanos por el Mundo; this story is an English version of our original Spanish-language report. We used artificial intelligence tools for research, image-rights checks and text review, always under the supervision of our editors, who checked every fact against its source.