The Buena Fe duo’s tour of Canada, scheduled for next May, was canceled as announced by the organizers. In a statement published in the Official site of The Opera House in Toronto, it was reported that the musicians do not meet the health requirements to enter the country as they are not immunized with a vaccine accepted by the Canadian Government.
“It is with great sadness and for reasons truly beyond our control that we have to cancel the tour (…), for now,” they explain in the message, which also points out that the decision is due to “the new restrictions imposed to foreigners who enter” that country and which came into force on January 15.
“We hope to one day be able to reschedule the tour. The band still has active visas for Canada after their successful tour in 2017,” they add.
Buena Fe was scheduled to perform in Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton between May 20 and 22 next.
The suspension occurs just one week after the signature collection was launched on the platform Change.org against the presentation of the Cuban duo in Canada, and where the cancellation of the concerts is requested.
“The reason for so much outrage is that the director of this group, Israel Rojas, is a strong spokesman for the Cuban dictatorship and has supported the abuses and human rights violations committed by the Havana regime against the people of Cuba,” argued Cuban Canadians for a Democratic Cuba, the organization that signs the petition.
“The reason for so much outrage is that the director of this group, Israel Rojas, is a strong spokesman for the Cuban dictatorship and has supported the abuses and human rights violations committed by the Havana regime against the people of Cuba”
In addition, they described the tour as “inadmissible” because “it constitutes an affront to the dignity of the thousands and thousands of Cubans residing in Canada who fight for a Free and Democratic Cuba”, “many Cubans, who also live in forced asylum outside of their homeland and who have been victims of the totalitarian dictatorship that now governs Cuba, which represses, imprisons and kills anyone who opposes it”.
“Whoever is silent in the face of a crime becomes an accomplice,” they conclude.
The vaccination guidelines for Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus, the antidotes created on the island, are more than 90% effective, according to Cuban health authorities, but these data have not been verified by external independent bodies.
And although Cuba for months has boasted of being the first Latin American country to immunize its population with national antidotes, it is of little use to the island’s nationals because most countries only accept drugs approved by the World Health Organization (WHO) and neither Abdala nor the sovereigns are included in this list.
Recently, Israel Rojas in an interview conducted for a documentary and whose text reproduced Cubadebate, claimed to feel “stigmatized” for supporting the regime. “Today, being branded as an official, for some people, is a stigma. For some creators, and for a few intellectuals, it’s like being branded as the arm of the devil,” he said.
Rojas, who in recent months has shown a strong defense of the Island Government, intervenes in the film The dictatorship of the algorithm, included in the homonymous book. Both are aimed at defending the arguments of the Cuban authorities, who insist on talking about an unconventional war that would be waged in cyberspace against their system, ignoring that they are also on that playing field.
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