Miami/This September 25 are 57 years old from that episode where they collected from the streets and restaurants thousands of young people who enjoyed the Havana night. We were all imprisoned without committing any crime, they took us direct for state security, they signed us without charges, without explanations, and after three days of uncertainty, they dispersed us prisons and farms In the province of Pinar del Río. We were accused – in that ideological hunt disguised as public order – of “improper conduct”, a law that did not exist and of which not even the lawyers had news, and all that happened in the area of El Vedado: the ramp, the Capri hotel, the Coppelia ice cream shop, the cafeteria of the Rivero funeral and in surrounding cafes, places that until then were refuge of freedom and expression.
Castro took advantage that the United States was shocked with the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, Paris burned with student strikes and Russian tanks – with the conformity of Havana – had invaded Czechoslovakia. All these international events, in addition to the Tlatelolco slaughter – which shook Mexico on October 2, a week after the raids in Havana – made very few outside Cuba find out about that violation of human rights committed (like so many others) by the Castro dictatorship, which began to radicalize with the USSR.
I was imprisoned for a year and 16 days because I was standing at the corner of 21 and O (on the sidewalk of the Capri, in front of the Los Andes restaurant) looking at the cheerful passersby who walked around. The reason for that unexpected collection was the youth we had: that we liked American music, foreign fashion, free love and let us leave our hair long. We wanted to recover what they had taken away: freedom, chewing gum, pall-mall cigars, Dunhill, Chesterfields, the Blue jeans Levi’s Strauss, the albums of Paul Anka and Sonny & Cheer, and prohibited us (although we never obeyed them) hear the music that all the young people of the world listened to: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Doors, The Byrds, The Supremes, The Misas and The Papas, Stevie Wonder, Simon and Garfunkel, etc. They abolished all Hollywood films to put Russian films loaded with depressing misery on cinemas. Then Japanese, French and Italian films arrived, to pale the situation with the rebel capital.
When in 1980 the events of the Embassy of Peru exploded in Havana, and then the exodus of the Mariel, we do not doubt it. We launched ourselves to the possibility of another destination
That massive arrest of September 25, 1968 failed to domesticate our attitude; On the contrary, he ignited it more strongly. For many of us, the experience of being treated as criminals for the simple fact of living with freedom – of listening to prohibited music, dressing as we wanted, or thinking without slogans – crudely revealed to us the true face of tyranny. What was intended to be an obedience lesson became a resistance school. Humillation, confinement, legal arbitrariness made us understand that there was no space for us in that social experiment, which called us “the new man” while denoting us the right to simply human.
Therefore, when in 1980 the events of the Embassy of Peru broke out in Havana, and then the Mariel ExodusWe don’t doubt it. We launched ourselves to the possibility of another destination, escaping from that infernal laboratory where they had used us as ideological Indian bunches. The revolution that promised redemption had made us suspect for loving freedom, and our only exit was fleeing to it.
In the country that received us, we could finally breathe without fear, rebuild our lives, and recover the dreams that had wanted us to start. We were not traitors or deserters: we were survivors of a utopia that became jail. And although exile brought its own wounds, it also gave us the possibility of narrating what has been lived, of turning pain into memory and memory in testimony. Because if we learned something in those years of repression, it was that freedom does not beg: it is conquered, it defends itself, and it is honored by telling the truth.
