Image from the Estado de SATS website.
Last Friday evening, October 19th, a new concert in support for Demanda Ciudadana por Otra Cuba (Citizen Demand for Another Cuba) was held in the usual venue for the Estado de SATS Project in Havana. This time, the young rappers of Ruta 11 and Estudiantes sin Semillas (Seedless Students) were in charge of the performance, which took place in that usual lively and peaceful place.
In addition to the enthusiasm and sincerity of these young amateurs and audience and their overall responsiveness, there were two distinctive notes: 1) The all too usual arrests of several people who had planned on attending, intercepted on the street, some of them first taken to a criminal investigation center in the municipality of Playa, and later confined to the dungeons of the stations at Santiago de Las Vegas (Boyeros Municipality) and Infanta and Manglar (Cerro) overnight; and 2) The panic that was unleashed by the mobilization of operative’s vehicles in the streets near the venue of the concert, where musicians and audience loudly chanted the chorus of the show’s final song: “Freedom , freedom, freedom! … “. Obviously, the wolf pack [the authorities] was afraid we would pour into the streets with such a dangerous clamor, so they rushed to cover the exits to block us. There are no words as subversive to the servile slave’s mind as that of FREEDOM.
Each concert, as well as the growing consensus the Demanda Ciudadana wins over across different social sectors, causes confusion among repression forces, and that evidently frightens the dictatorship. Is the system so fragile that it gets afraid in the face of what an esteemed Cuban intellectual termed “the vast minority”? Do the aging leaders feel so weak that they send out their bigwigs to try to boycott the budding spirit of freedom? It’s all in vain. That other Cuba is already underway.
October 22 2012
