The international figures of Cuban music Chucho Valdés and Leo Brouwer want to make it clear that today they are far from making the fierce defense of the regime that they did for so many years, although they have been criticized by many followers after standing next to the 15N protesters.
Both, who have already spoken out against the repression of the regime after the spontaneous demonstrations of July 11, they do it again forcefully after the 15N, the date on which the threats, harassment and repression of the security forces thwarted the Civic March for Change convened by the Archipelago platform.
“Many years ago I saw the Batista police ruthlessly attacking university students,” he writes in your facebook wall Chucho Valdés, who says that at the time he was a student at the Normal School for teachers who lived with “terror” the passing of the police in front of the classrooms, “because the young people and the people could not demonstrate freely demanding changes or the departure of the president.” .
In 1959, continues the pianist, son of Bebo Valdés, who left Cuba in 1960 and died in exile in Stockholm, Sweden, “it was promised that things like that would never happen again, that there would be freedom of expression and free elections. Of course we believed it, but the images I see are incredible, “he says, without specifying, in his post, which concludes by asking for” freedom for all Cubans. “
“Many years ago I saw the Batista police ruthlessly attacking university students,” Chucho Valdés writes on his Facebook wall.
The post has been celebrated by some users, but criticized by others. “Thank you for being on the side of light and on the side of men with dignity and values,” says an admirer. “You owe nothing to the government of Cuba, your people remain the same, wherever they are.” Faced with expressions of that cut, there are also the disappointed. “What a pity. You are still a great artist, but no longer a great human being. You have died for those like me,” says another reader sternly.
Throughout this Monday, activists or simple neighbors spread through the networks small videos that showed the violent intrusions of uniformed or plainclothes officers in the houses to arrest citizens who had hung white clothes, the color chosen for the protest in favor of freedom.
For his part, the composer and guitarist Leo Brouwer published on his networks a video in which he walks out in the dark with a candle and his own voice in off asserting that it supports all Cubans, among which is included, “who ask for a better country” and “that right of expression with which every human is born.” “For once you live you have to do it with dignity and decorum, without manipulation, without hatred, and much less confronting,” the musician is heard to say, a recognized figure throughout the world who came to direct important festivals within the Island and has been a mentor to other artists. “For me it is sad to refer to Cuba as the country of no”, he asserts, “as a lost, sunk or destroyed island, where nothing is possible, where everything is censored, criticized, after an inquisitive power that repudiates what is not its convenience”.
Brouwer wishes that “current and future generations of Cubans feel proud of their land”
Brouwer wishes that “current and future generations of Cubans feel proud of their land” and, thus, he assures that he joins ” [sus] fellow artists and people in general “:” I do not want more grief or more suffering. Enough already. “
It is clear that neither of the two would be today, as they were in 2003, among the signatories of the one that justified the execution of three young people for hijacking a ferry in an attempt to leave the country.
Without naming them, but illustrating with a photo of Valdés an article titled Music pleasing Miami: genuflection and pacification, the official cultural magazine The Jiribilla he attacks the “avalanche of seductions” that the United States asserts on various Cuban musicians as a result of the thaw initiated by then-President Barack Obama.
In the note they do mention other artists such as Yotuel Romero, Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno or Maykel Castillo Osorbo, to whom, without saying that he has been in prison since last May, they sarcastically qualify as a “new linguistic star.” Nor do they refer in the note that all of them, architects of Homeland and Life, converted in hymn of the protests on the Island, will be present at the Latin Grammys this Thursday, where the song compete in two categories.
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