In these days of waiting for the Pope, everything around me is tense.

I start to leave my phone at home.

They followed me from before the presentation of Voices Magazine Number 14.

But it is only persecution, at least they want you to think.

I thought it wouldn’t be for some graffiti artist.

Occasionally I can slip out among my friends and shake off the guard.

Although it is a super uncomfortable situation and full of stress, it’s already so common for me to be followed by them they I’m not afraid and can shout at them, things like dogs, snitches, pawns, and so on.

I got used to it and, as my ex says, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

It was Sunday, March 26, my sister Indira’s birthday, and seeing State Security was barely 20 yards from my door, I didn’t want to leave the house. I took it as a threat not to leave. But they slept outside all night and that worried me a lot and I felt some fear.

The next day, March 27 at 1:00 pm I saw them at the corner of my house with cardboard in the windows of the car, so that the sun doesn’t bother them, I think. It was the same red car as the day before. I had to go out to make a phone call, I did, in shorts, a shirt and sandals, heading away from them. I’d barely walked 15 yards when I could sense them starting up the car around the corner.

They came up behind me, grabbed me by force and shoved me inside the car between two guys dressed in civilian clothes. Car rules: Hands between the feet and eyes forward! They snatched the phone out of my hands.

DO NOT TURN IT OFF! they said.

The car with three officers took me to Vedado, 26th and 17th, where they stopped, made calls on their cell phones, and in 5 minutes a Suzuki motorcycle and the usual “persecution car” showed up (a green Lada make with private license plates): with that Camilo. On the way he told me, “Today you’re playing Capablanca [the grandmaster] at chess.” Driving down Boyeros Avenue you could see all the “makeup” they’d applied, for obvious reasons.

I thought why are they doing this to me if they don’t want to damage the Pope, and I’m not some trash you can sweep under the carpet. When we got to the station at Santiago de las Vegas Camilo got out and when he returned they took me in through the back. As they were leaving me there a policeman told Camilo he was needed for another arrest. Camilo disappeared.

When they transferred me to the cells I saw a man dressed in black, a gentleman I would come to know later, it was Julio, the husband of Sara Marta, Lady in White, opponents from Rio Verde. As we were not in the same cell we were talking from a distance. He told me that he had seen me on the Estado de Sats program, and that he’d been there since Friday with eating or drinking water (a hunger strike). I was just starting my time and I felt bad already, but being locked up there for no reason gave me strength. Julio told me this his wife had also been kidnapped and he thought they had taken her to Cotorro incommunicado.

The next day opponents became to arrive from the Santiago de las Vegas police station, all on hunger strike: 14 in total, including 3 women whom I only sensed and heard their voices. Those of us there had opinions in common. The chorus of “Freedom!” became so strong we were encouraged to also shout “Down with the Dictatorship,” “Down with Raul,” “Long Live Human Rights”…

The police asked up please, if we wanted we could shout, but not to go near the bars. For us they were invisible. I met Bartolo, El Deje, all very affable and I felt find, because we talked as if we’d known each other all our lives.

The registered me as a criminal: many photos of my body and finger prints and something odd: the shoe size.

The next day I felt dizzy. I asked Julio how he felt and he said fine. I was taken to the doctor who tested my sugar, which was low as was my blood pressure. The doctors were worried, telling me, “You don’t have the physical strength to do this. Eat!” Nor am I a murderer, but I am here because you want me to be, I answered. On returning from the exam I gave to alcohol swab to Julio, he shook my hand but I felt he was sick.

In the evening I left the dungeon. There were about 20 patrol cars outside the station. Coincidentally Julio andI were put in the same car and they transported us. The order was to leave us a few blocks from our respective houses. He got out at Boyeros, near Mazorra, and I at Arroyo Arenas.

They gave me my phone and there were no texts or missed calls. When it rang it was the wife of Ismael de Diego, I told her I was already out. She told me that when she called my phone, an officer answered.

This is my humble testimony. I don’t people who had it a lot worse. The government should avoid and fear these hunger strikes in chains… Lest they kill more innocents and fall into the muck once and for all. I hope the world learns of all the kidnappings and sees behind the false image this tyranny wants to give to the Pope and the foreign press.

Down with the Castros! Down with Communism!

A caricature by a master of Cuban humor, thank you Garrincha

Translator’s note: The billboard refers to the “Five Heroes” — Cuban spies imprisoned in the U.S.  “El Sexto” — “The Sixth” the moniker chosen for himself by Danilo — is meant to imply he is also a hero, the sixth one.

I am in the selection of Diario de Cuba!!!

(Third row, second from right.)

2 January 2012

While the drug entered my body, my arms and legs were
remaining motionless. In my veins the poison ran so fast
neutralizing me, so it could never escape, the cry that was
hanging in my throat of HELP. I coughed, I moved my head to one side and
the other; with much effort I was able to see my notebook of
drawings with the pencil. A LIFELINE! My arm crawled like a snake
dying. What luck! It had a point. For some reason my fist
seized up it was inflexible. It was open exactly the same
thickness of the pencil like a socket. While trying to scream on the paper
HELP, my pulse was still more skilled and a tear of impotence
fell on the pencil eraser and ran to the tip. As if the
pencil was collecting my tears, my arm and my hand caught themselves
all in the air for you in the future. It fit on the paper, which for
some reason I could reach them and for some other reason I was no longer
dying in vain and nothing would go unpunished. Everything conspired to my
state which you knew.
Dedicated to Helena Moradi for all that we did together.
El Sexto

I’m so crazy I think I can be a writer.
Or at least play at being one, as to be a writer painter, singer, etc. is
the same, you just have to be it.
The only thing that differentiates us from others is the ego: if I
I think it I am.
Indeed that is what, I am sure, an artist is: an egocentric.
So it is with art and other crafts that do not mean to work for
another but for your inner being.
The artist, whatever his manifestations, is by nature a
egocentric.
He believes in his abstract metatranca*, believes that he has such a great idea
he should tell it to others, and bet his life on his thesis.
Others as they don’t dare to tell their own, if they had one,
then listen and are seduced by so much certainty in the
projection they see, so that sometimes apart from believing myself a graffiti artist I believe I am
writer, singer and even underground art teacher, but only
when I’m with me.
Since I have sufficient capacity for these trades I hope to be able to
channel in the art whatever ego I carry in me.
I hope I never stray from the path because I think that the ego of the
politicians like that of the philosophers is a right ego and that it clearly picks up
the truth and logic.
I prefer the artist, I think the ego of artists is more
playful and the dogma lets it be and it becomes innocent, abstract and
untranslatable into words, sometimes mixed with lies and
truth and good and bad. I identify more with the plastic artists,
poets or musicians.
The artist is able to drain the two poles with no interest in
manipulating it to one side or the other, only showing it and abstracting it in
sound keys (as in music) or in symbols (as in the plastic).
Not of the logical or the serious and of sensations, disgust, love,
happiness, sadness; self-searching.
But I defend at this point my trade because it is the visual that governs
the universe.
Nobody escapes seeing even when we don’t see or when we sleep, and
the shape, lines, colors do not know anything of bad or good
or of reason or of dogma but are essentially the basis of them all.
We constantly visualize within us, without being able to
stop, and can be either a flower that is opening or the explosion of an atomic bomb
and smoke spreading into the sky. As seen on TV an
image of an atomic explosion leaves me anesthetized seeing the phenomenon
for although on its passing all is destroyed my brain only collects the bizarre.
So much majesty, form, color and expansion; and thank goodness
the TV or PC exist to view them safely.
So symbols synthesize what I see and my mind and my arm translate it
when I squeeze the spray can because as well as being self-centered I have no other
medicine to throw this fucking thing out of my head.
The tool that only fits in my arm is the Spray can, it is with it that
I can best express myself at the speed I think.
Hugs and Kisses and enjoy my little work.

Translator’s note:
*Metatranca is a colloquialism in Cuban culture and academics referring to intellectual discourse characterized by the use of arbitrary, undefined words and phrases, imported from barely known languages with the intent of faking wisdom.

Danilo is now home, they brought him early. He spent the night in the Zapata police station, without knowing where they had taken Gorki. He said that yesterday 30 plainclothes State Security officials attacked him and Gorki at G and 23rd. As of right now he knows nothing of Gorki.

Translator’s note: In Tweets, it was reported that Gorki’s arrest was particularly violent and he was slammed against a wall.