They knocked on the door with a search warrant that Aldo’s mother could barely see. They went directly to the room to take the computer where the lyrics of those songs that circulate throughout the country are stored. There was no way to make the police see that this man with long hair and tattoos all over his body is not a delinquent. Those in uniforms do not like hip hop and a hairy “tatted up” man is what, to them, most resembles a criminal. They didn’t take into account that this one had been evoked by Juanes just a week ago in the Plaza of the Revolution when he mentioned the group Los Aldeanos. The news of the detention spread until the singer Silvio Rodriguez himself interceded for them to return the computer and to let him go home. Aldo and Bian already have been isolated from almost everything, save this gift for music that the censorship has not managed to take from them. Some friends distributed printed sheets to denounce the exclusion of the popular duo and proposed that “these men be accepted as vital organs of the nation, it’s a question of honor.” But ours is a society admitted into intensive care with transplanted parts and a dialysis machine connected to the area where citizenship should be working. We live on an Island where they excise and amputate because a few diagnose that a member has gangrene when in reality it is, simply, different.
On having taken the musician and his computer—which lacks ownership papers as the vast majority do in Cuba—perhaps they were administering an injection of dread, the medication known to increase fear. But already it doesn’t work like before. Now, the apprehension is transformed in songs, in blogs, on discs that circulate hand to hand, while the confiscations and arrests only make it go further.
