It has been a busy summer for the Cuban artist and former political prisoner Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara. Upon finishing a five-year prison sentence in Cuba, he was moved to a beach-front government safe house, where he said he drank beer and Chinese whiskey with state security agents. Then came a surprisingly hard part: exile in Miami, where within days his hero’s welcome turned into a social media maelstrom. The reproaches came soon after he arrived last month, particularly from online influencers. He looked too healthy to have spent five years in prison, critics said. Since when does the Cuban government let prisoners paint in their cells — or take thousands of paintings into exile, they wondered. And he stunned audiences when, in an interview with an 87-year-old former political prisoner, he talked crudely about sex.

Overnight, Mr. Otero Alcántara became a living testament to the tangled realities of the Cuban diaspora: generations of exiles and their families, many of whom have never set foot on the island, as well as recent arrivals who grew up under communist rule. Unlike many diaspora members who are wealthy and white, Mr. Otero is Black and has working-class roots, the son of a welder and an office worker from El Cerro, a gritty Havana neighborhood. So on one side, Mr. Otero Alcántara had a rapturous reception, from figures as varied as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a member of the hip-hop group Orishas and hundreds who came to see his work unveiled at Miami’s Freedom Tower. But he also faced a flurry of negative reactions, so fast and so harsh that some experts wondered whether Cuban state security was surreptitiously running a propaganda campaign to tarnish a rising star of the dissident movement. Experts said that the artist probably was afforded special treatment as a prisoner because officials knew that he would, like other dissidents, receive significant attention after he was released. Letting him leave the country looking healthy and with paintings could help discredit other political prisoners who reported abuses, and perhaps improve Cuba’s image around the world, they said.