El Sexto Again in Danger, December 2014 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Friends of the world, I just talked with the graffiti artist El Sexto — Danilo Maldonado Machado — from Havana, Cuba.

State Security agents are like bloodhounds after him, all over the city, on motorbikes and in cars.

They are intimidating him, but in the end his arrest by the police appears imminent.

The Ladies in White Association is going to organize a huge, peaceful, pro-human rights march in El Vedado on 10 December. And the repressors are doing what they did during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI in March of 2012: “preventative” mass arrests for more than a week, without legal charges nor any right to make a phone call: Pure State kidnappings.

El Sexto’s art has no place in the Castroism that castrates our free Cuban hearts.

The agents are pressuring him to go into exile. I also told him to consider it, because between the Cubanamericantotalitarian Tycoons and the European Business Left, the play is already set to impose on us another half century of Castroism without Castro.

El Sexto just said to me, “Thank you for your friendly advice, Landy, but for me… they are going to have to kill me in this country.”

And El Sexto knows very well of what he speaks, because he wears on his skin the assassinated bodies of Laura Pollán y Oswaldo Payá.

1 December 2014