MIAMI, United States.- The Cuban artist and former political prisoner Hamlet Lavastida denounced this Wednesday in the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy 2022 the psychological torture he experienced in a Cuban prison despite the fact that the regime in Havana released him on the condition that he would never talk about it.
During his speech, in the section Resisting dictatorships in Latin America, together with speakers also from Venezuela and Nicaragua, Lavastida said that in September 2021 he was released “after signing an official document” that conditioned his release by agreeing that “I would remain silent and I would not talk about the Cuban government or about the time I spend in prison.”
“I grew up in Cuba in the 90s, and unlike previous generations, we did not romanticize the Cuban revolution because we saw what it really was, despotism and brutal corruption,” he began his speech before hundreds of participants.
Hamlet Lavastida recalled that the late dictator Fidel Castro always said that Cubans were his family, but when he was a child he thought “yes, we are your family, but where is the food”.
The artist denounced that his family stayed in those years, west of Havana, in the town of Santa Fe, in long lines to buy bread. “There was no meat or oil, no moral values. We thought it was going to be for a short period of time, but 1993 passed, then 1994, 1995, 1996, and thus the people of Cuba lost hope in their government.”
It was also in Santa Fe that the young man listened for the first time to radio stations from the United States, which could be tuned in on the FM frequency. “There I learned a little English, but it was also the first time that I heard Cuban exiles speak critically of the Cuban government, and also that there was another Cuba, another vision and another history,” he recalled.
“The revolution, like Saturn, devours its own children,” he said, and that is why I decided to use their own propaganda against them, but I knew that my art would not be well received in the country.”
Lavastida recounted chronologically the events that led to the Cuban State Security detaining him on June 26, 2021 upon his arrival on the island from abroad. They sent him to Villa Marista and
“They interrogated me every day for several weeks, but in July 11 thousand people took to the streets to protest because they wanted freedom. It was the largest protest Cuba has ever experienced, and on that day the government arrested thousands of protesters and charged them with crimes against the state and security.”
Those months in prison still haunt him, where he was threatened several times with a sentence of 15 to 20 years in prison. “Prison is the worst place for anyone, and for an artist it is even worse. They know that they are losing, that soon they will be called to tell, until that day I will never stop talking about Cuba and raising awareness”, he sentenced.
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