To walk to the edge of the stage and speak only within limits is required practice for certain critical artists still living in Cuba. Occasionally they offer us a phrase seasoned with dissent which will be published in foreign newspapers, though it will find no echo in our national ones. With one foot inside and one foot outside the Island, it must be difficult to go from speaking out to whispering. The long stays abroad have thus become a catalyst of opinions for some representatives of our culture. Evidently, interaction with other realities - with their achievements and their problems - have made the triumphalist slogans sound very distant while the intolerance in their own backyard becomes insufferable.
Pablo Milanes' last interview - published in Spain under the title, "I want change in Cuba as soon as possible" - shows, on the one hand, the restraint with which he avoids burning the bridges of return, and on the other the audacity of someone who is very worried about what is happening in his country. There is, undoubtedly, an enormous risk in calling those who govern us, "reactionaries of their own ideas"; these are the people who have censored so many writers, musicians and actors for saying much less. The author of the song Yolanda walks the knife's edge along which others have been cut to shreds. Protecting him in this undertaking are the strength of his international reputation and the support of people from every place and generation. An unknown neighborhood singer-songwriter would pay dearly, but they need Pablo.
Emigration has marked too strongly the artistic level on our stages. Not only have my colleagues from the university and my contemporaries from the neighborhood left en masse, but Cuban culture has a percentage of its representatives - some would say a majority - outside our borders. To lose, now, this strong voice would be to admit that those who composed the background music that accompanied the construction of utopia have stopped believing in it. So no website of any official institution is going publish an aggressive and threatening diatribe against the frankness of the interviewee. Nor will they inform the Madrid consulate that he is no longer welcome in his own country, nor accuse him of speaking with the words of an "American lover." None of these stigmatizing strategies will be deployed against Pablo, but in the off-hour ministerial chats and the closed circles of power they will not forgive him for having behaved like a free man.
Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.
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On September 15, 1981, Castro gave the opening speech at the 63rd conference of the Interparliamentary Union in Havana. These are the remarks from the “horse” mouth on the Irish Republican who died during the hunger :
“In my opinion, Irish patriots are writing one of the most heroic chapters in human history. They have earned the respect and admiration of the world, and likewise they deserve its support. Ten of them have already died in the most moving gesture of sacrifice, selflessness and courage one could ever imagine.
Humanity should feel ashamed that this terrible crime is committed before its very eyes. These young fighters do not ask for independence nor make impossible demands to put an end to their strike; they ask only for something as simple as the recognition of what they actually are: political prisoners.
The stubbornness, intransigence, cruelty, insensitivity before the international community of the British Government faced with the problem of Irish patriots on hunger strikes until death, remind us of Torquemada and the barbarity of the inquisition in the middle ages.
Let tyrants tremble before men who are capable of dying for their ideals after 60 days of hunger strike! What were Christ's three days in Calvary, an age-old symbol of human sacrifice, compared to that example?
Indeed it is. This is one of the few times that I totally agree with the Tyrannosaurus Rex.