Havana Cuba. – According to Bob Dylan in his song The day of the locust (The day of the lobster), from the 1970 album new morningwhen he received his doctor’s degree honoris causa at Princeton University he felt that a plague of locusts singing in the distance were singing for him.
Dylan was confused. He was sick of being seen as the voice and conscience of his generation; He wanted to dedicate more time to his family and rock as he pleased, but at the same time he felt that accepting that doctorate was putting down his rebellion, giving in to him. establishment and accept that he assimilated it.
On June 2, when he received the title of doctor honoris causa that awarded by the University of Havanain a ceremony attended by the Cuban ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel, the Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez did not hear the song of the lobsters.
In Cuba we have many pests – cockroaches, bedbugs, lice, santanillas, etc. – but there is no insect that devastates crops. The lobsters here are the exquisite marine crustaceans reserved exclusively for the elite of the regime that Silvio rubs shoulders with, foreign tourists and a wealthy few.
But more than because of the non-existence of the insect in our territory, Silvio did not hear the locusts sing, those that lurk in our conscience, because having been the voice of his generation, many years ago he lowered his rebel flag and not only gobbled up by the regime but agreed to become its official singer and its ambassador to the Spanish-speaking world.
Unlike the very free Bob Dylan, whom he admires more than he usually admits – he says that Dylan influenced him “only a little”, back in 1969 -, Silvio Rodríguez, who lives under a dictatorship and has made a career of it and obtained privileges as a reward, he is not free to express the pangs of his conscience, his doubts and regrets. When he tried to do it, in his beginnings as a singer-songwriter, the bosses and their commissioners removed him from radio and television and he ended up on a fishing boat, the Playa Girón, where they sent him to work to purge his ideological problems. . And even so, Silvio had the hard face, when he received his doctorate, to congratulate himself for having lived in “a revolution that allowed diversity of thought.”
It is not in vain that Silvio boasts of being a fool and assures that he dies as he lived. So much so, that he allows himself to be managed once again by the regime, this time so that it uses him as the best and most powerful weapon available to him for “the cultural war” that he claims is being waged by the enemy.
If they didn’t have Silvio Rodríguez at their whim, what punch artist could the regime use? whatRaul Torres, Good faith, Arnaldo and his Talisman, Candido Fabre?
Nor does Silvio Rodríguez listen to sing to the lobsters because the doctorate honoris causa it’s too big for him Good in Humanities because Silvio, more than a singer, is a poet (politics aside, regardless of who it weighs). But, also in Social Sciences?
The bosses and commissioners of official culture would like to score a huge goal by awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Silvio, as they did to Bob Dylan. But other singer-songwriters with greater merits than Silvio, as poets as he or much more, such as Leonard Cohen or Joan Manuel Serrat, have not been awarded the Nobel, so no matter how much solidarity groups with Castroism are active in Europe and mobilize their committees of embarrassment, it is very difficult that they grant it to the author of blue unicorn and The era is giving birth to a heart. I hope they don’t give Castroism for mounting a dog, branding the Swedish Academy as fascist and accusing it of having joined “the culture war of haters against revolutionary artists.”
OPINION ARTICLE
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