AREQUIPA, Peru – Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez premiered on social networks the fragment of a song in which he addresses the reality of a country where there was nothing to eat. In the midst of the deep economic crisis in Cuba, Internet users relate the verses to the Island.
“There was a country a thousand years ago, once, that was bad because there was nothing to eat,” read the lyrics of the song that the artist performed with his guitar. “Then prophets came to teach with many books that had to be studied.”
Although the singer-songwriter does not mention the name of the country in famine, he does explain that the “prophets” who arrived there preached a “dream” from which everything was learned “word by word.”
“The tools were forgotten by fantasy. But then they didn’t know how to plow. But then he didn’t know how to hammer. But later they didn’t even know how to sew, because later the tools despised men,” Rodríguez acknowledges in another of the verses.
Given what could be allegories to Cuba, the dictatorship established by Fidel Castro and its communist system, users expressed their bewilderment at the artist’s recent critical tendency towards the situation in the country.
“He returned to his place of origin, when he started singing protest songs against the dictatorship. But it seems that they brainwashed him and changed their route,” said an Internet user identified as Joaquín Martínez.
“Castro said about this ‘poet’ that he walked around with tight shorts and a little guitar with ‘Elvisprelian’ gestures,” wrote another user with the Miguel Cardó profile.
And then the protest song became the new trova (…) This is how I betray my generation. And so he took refuge in Haydee’s (Santamaría) skirt and became a millionaire,” said Jesús Dimas Cruz, another user.
Last July, after having criticized the economic measures announced by the island’s regime, Silvio Rodríguez clarified that he was not changing his “principles” and that he did not regret “his life”, distancing himself to a certain extent from any anti-Castro label.
On your blog, Second Datethe Cuban musician then considered it a “manipulation” that the independent media had alluded to his previous statements where he believed that the Cubans were destroying the country. “If we do not quickly dismantle what is holding us back, we will be swallowed up by our own creations. They are already chewing us up. Let’s wake up,” he said then.
Now, by way of retraction, he considers that his words were misinterpreted by “those opposed to the political process that has been called the Cuban Revolution”: “They say that I am changing, as if it were possible to repent of my life.”
Rodríguez, who criticized the inefficiency of the current system and argued that a “complicated device” who is now a “burden”, attacked the media that reported his position because, according to him, he has always expressed what he thinks.
Silvio Rodríguez, for decades complacent with the Cuban ruling party, concluded by alleging that socialism “has better human possibilities than capitalism”; However, he said, tepidly, that it will have to be a “truly superior socialism.”
