The three artists defend their personal experience and the idea that they could be happy on the Island, after the controversy unleashed by the statements of one of them.
MIAMI, United States. – The statements of the Cuban comedian Geonel Martín, known as “Gustavito” ―the name of his character in the program Sabadazo, on Cuban Television―, in an interview with the project The Cuban family sparked a controversy on social networks, with public reactions from Cuban entertainment figures such as Ulysses Toirac and the actress Susana Perez.
The discussion was activated after, when asked where he had been happier, in Cuba or the United States, he opted for Cuba. However, the comedian specified that he emigrated because he wanted to “be happier” and because his children “needed” a country like the United States, not one like Cuba, “which is destroyed.”
In that fragment of the interview, Martín also recounted work experiences on the Island that he described as emotionally intense. He said that, after a period without performing, he was called to perform, he went on a tour and said he cried when he saw lines of people waiting for him. “That was total happiness,” he stated, although he immediately maintained that he did not stay in Cuba “for the children” (his children), and described a feeling of emotional tug-of-war between both countries.
In the midst of the commotion, Ulises Toirac intervened from Facebook with a message in which he criticized the intolerance surrounding what his colleague said and defended the right to narrate personal experiences without receiving attacks. “Recently Gustavito said in an interview that he had been happy in Cuba… And the intolerance there (which is none other than the twin sister of intolerance here) ate him,” he wrote.
Toirac explained that he did not consider the center of the problem to be Martín, but rather the reactions that sought to invalidate his experience. “It’s not really Geonel Martín who I have to advise,” he said, before expanding the idea with an explicit defense of the right to think differently: “We have to learn to let people think whatever they really want without attacking them because simply for another person the experiences in Cuba were not happy. Geonel Martín was happy! Period,” he wrote.
The comedian also placed his position on a personal and generational level, recognizing that his own relationship with Cuba did not coincide with that of others, and that this did not authorize him to disqualify anyone: “My greatest congratulations are [en] CUBA, despite everything! I can’t get rid of a country in which I have been famous and very loved by the majority (which is how Gustavito feels about it). We don’t think alike. No human being thinks like another,” he said.
In the same text, Toirac attributed the deterioration of the debate to a culture of confrontation that, in his opinion, has been established on both sides of the strait. “In the end the purpose of creating intolerant people won. If we cannot put an end to that, we will never achieve ANYTHING as a nation. We will never be able to achieve a society that serves the interests of a majority. Because there is simply no majority, there are millions of individuals who do not tolerate another’s thought if it is not the same as their own,” he wrote.
Toirac closed with a defense of Martín’s artistic value: “I didn’t want to get into the mess of the CDR of Miami, but he is still my brother and I love him with my life. And what was put together is wrong. Truly an artist whose work should be appreciated,” he concluded.
The renowned actress Susana Pérez joined the conversation in the comments of the post de Toirac and reinforced the idea that a positive experience in Cuba does not invalidate the subsequent decision to emigrate: “I was also happy in Cuba, I made my career and earned the love of 11 million Cubans, I had friends, I had my entire family, until I stopped being happy and decided, as I always say, to slam the door on Nora. To deny that is to deny oneself,” he wrote.
Although the debate was articulated around a short phrase, the discussion was amplified by the circulation of clips and clippings of the exchange on social networks, including posts on Instagram that took up Martín’s response to the question “Where have you been happier, in Cuba or in the United States?”
