The Cuban official group Buena Fe will not be able to sing in Salamanca or Zamora, two Spanish cities where they had two concerts scheduled this week. Nor could they do it in Barcelona, where they were going to perform last Sunday, and although they did not accept the suspension of another concert, in Tenerife, and at shopping platforms of tickets are cancelled.
“Under the pretext of defending democracy, fascist harassment and threats have been unleashed against the owners of the premises and that has been stronger than the songs,” regretted the grouping on his Facebook profile, where numerous users celebrated the cancellation.
This Sunday, Buena Fe published in the same network a “clarification” where they attributed the failure of their trip to Barcelona to “organizational and logistical reasons”, and denied that the suspension of the show had a political cause. It was “something totally normal on tours of this type,” they claimed.
They ended their message with a complaint about the “persecution and harassment of promoters and owners of concert halls”
The publication was made based on the complaints of the exiled doctors and activists Lucio Enríquez Nodarse and Emilio Arteaga Pérez, who claimed to have been attacked at the Buena Fe concert in Madrid by alleged agents of the Cuban political police who posed as guards of security.
The group pointed out that only four of its members – including singer Israel Rojas and guitarist Yoel Martínez – had traveled to Spain, and that the team did not include security agents. “There is little we can do against the repeated defamation, the media aggression, the demonization,” they complained, alluding to the repudiation that their presentations had caused among the Cuban exile community.
“We are not employees of any government,” they continued. “This is our job and from that we honestly support our families.” In addition, they promised not to “do or say anything under pressure from anyone,” in reference to those who “denigrate, disrespect or offend” Cubans affiliated with the regime abroad.
They ended their message with a complaint about the “persecution and harassment of promoters and owners of concert halls.”
The Buena Fe tour began to fail on May 11, at the Galileo Galilei venue in Madrid, with the attack on Enríquez and Arteaga. Enríquez himself contacted the owners of the venues where the other presentations were going to take place: Sala Sidecar, in Barcelona; Búho Club, in San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife); Music Factory, in Salamanca, and Avalón Café, in Zamora. In addition, it was supposed that on May 19 and 21 they were going to return to the Galileo Galilei hall, although whoever tries to buy tickets for this last presentation will be redirected to another concertthis time in the local El Corral de las Cigüeñas, in Cáceres.
“We said that without our phones we were not going to go out. One, because this is not Cuba, two because it is a crime and three because all our private information is there”
On his Facebook account, Enríquez broadcast the moment in which, at the end of one of the songs during the concert on May 11 in Madrid, the cry “Patria y vida!” and “Freedom for political prisoners!”, and immediately there is a struggle and the direct is cut.
Arteaga Pérez later explained in a broadcast on Facebook who entered the concert considering that “it was an opportunity for us to exercise our right to freedom of expression” to vindicate the fight for the freedom of the regime’s political prisoners.
“We didn’t interrupt the concert,” he says. According to his account, when the duo finished the second song, Nodarse got up and yelled “Israel Rojas.” Within seconds, men in the room ran towards them, surrounded them and began to beat them.
Arteaga denounced that the agents punched and kicked them in various parts of the body, and also took away the cell phones with which they were transmitting. Spanish security established a containment perimeter and asked them to leave the room for the concert to continue.
“But we said that without our phones we were not going to go out. One, because this is not Cuba, two because it is a crime and three because all our private information is there,” explains the doctor, who recalls that the agents committed a crime by wanting to confiscate mobile phones in europe
“Miraculously they send us the cell phones from hand to hand among the people in the public and they reach the table where we were,” he said. At that moment they decided to leave the room and called the Spanish Police, who received the complaint and started an investigation.
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