Havana Cuba. — Most of the actors who shared roles in the two most popular comedy shows on Cuban television in the last two decades (let me tell you Y Live the story) are located in the United States.
Welcomed into exile for different reasons, they are all united by the common weariness of censorship and political control that govern culture in Cuba.
It doesn’t matter if Andy Vázquez (Facundo, Aguaje, Bienvenido) left because he was expelled from television, if Nelson Gudin (El bacán, Urbinito, Flor de anís) did the same because he was ostracized, or if Omar Franco (Ruperto Marchatrás) left the revolution disillusioned. All of them have lived and acted under the humiliating pressure of feeling restricted in their creative or interpretive freedom.
Although humor, like other manifestations of art, cannot be thought of or done in captivity, since the first years of the revolutionary regime, humorists of the stature of Guillermo Álvarez Guedes and the duo The Thaddeus they were expelled from television and forced to leave the country for making the people laugh with their satires of leaders.
Since 2014, the Resolution 125 of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) prevents —in a “legal” way— the right to exercise criticism that the censors consider denigrating and corrosive.
According to the aforementioned regulations, “workers who hold artistic positions in the ICRT cannot denigrate the integrity and dignity of individuals and groups or Cuban or foreign institutions.” If they did, they would be reprimanded or separated from the media.
The program let me tell you It was one of the pretexts for the creation of the Resolution 125, Well, characters like “Lindoro Incapable” (Rewel Remedios), Professor Chicken Mind! (Carlos Gonzalvo), Inspector La Llave (Miguel Moreno) or Flor de Anís (Nelson Gudín) satirized and ridiculed demagogic and corrupt officials.
How many did not associate the narcissistic pose of Lindoro Incapable in front of the mirror, saying “Myself!”, with that of Raúl Castro in a similar attitude before the execution of General Arnaldo Ochoa? Who did not hear in Lindoro’s voice that of Ulises Guilarte De Nacimiento, the general secretary of the CTC, and that of other officials of the regime when he said in front of his workers from the Bartolete Pérez and Roca Izquierda workshops: “Where one of you fall wounded, I fall dead”?
We can compare the gibberish and amazing responses of Professor Mente de Pollo given to the journalist Flor de Anís on Tele Pío with the explanations given by the Minister of Economy Alejandro Gil Fernández in the Round table.
It is impossible not to associate the corrupt inspector La Llave with those inspectors who fleece entrepreneurs and the self-employed, and the bribable members of the brigades who are supposed to combat coleros and resellers.
That most of the comedians who embodied such characters are today in exile, or condemned to ostracism within Cuba, is due to the repressive intolerance of a regime that presumes to be moralistic and rigid.
to the macabre Resolution 125 was due to the expulsion of actor Andy Vázquez from television. His sin was uploading a video to social networks where one of his characters, Facundo Correcto, humorously narrated The Battle of Cuatro Caminos, that is, the assault on the Cuatro Caminos Market by several dozen starving residents of the capital.
The official journalist Paquita de Armas justified the expulsion of Andy Vázquez in an article in Cubadebate titled Facundo, “Living the story”, censorship, Silva and the controversy continueswhere he attributed to the actor “the bad intention of discrediting the revolution”.
The cultural policy of the Castro regime, parodying Groucho Marx, is to look for problems, find them and then give them the wrong remedy.
Humor in Cuba is in danger of extinction. At the rate we are going, with so much censorship and intolerance, Cubans, to make humor, will have to go to Miami or Madrid.
OPINION ARTICLE
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