Repression at Paya’s Funeral / Mario Lleonart

Regrettably, I did not have the honor of being part of the repression that was not lacking this time, either.  I long suspected that the time to depart for the cemetery would be the most propitious for the flock of buzzards to throw themselves over the innumerable prisoners.  And it was precisely this that saved me this time: the enormous quantity of potential victims. I was surprised that before arriving at Necropolis I was already receiving on my cell phone reports about detentions of individuals who minutes before had been very near me. The Reverend Ricardo Santiago Medina Salabarria, for example, was barely a few people away from me trying to board the same bus as I, but he could not and remained available to the violence.

During the burial, and even during the return trip on the highway to Santa Clara, among tweets that I sent and received with names of dozens of people that had been subject to detention and that included friends like Antonio Rodiles of Estado de Sats and his wife Ailer.  They even dared to attack the Sakharov 2011 Prize winner, Guillermo Farinas, without taking into account or maybe precisely because of having done so, that in October they had cast off Laura Pollan and that now they were considering getting rid of Paya, the other two prizes awarded by the European Parliament.

Knowing that I left behind so many detained people, and being home now and knowing that including around forty people found themselves asking for the liberation of Rodiles at the police station of Infanta and Manglar, they provided me the sensation that it has stayed very low of the duties that in those moments Cuba demanded, but like always, we are prisoners of time and space, as the absent sense reminds us now forever of a man in our human trial should still be here, as happened to us already in the past with famous citizens like Cespedes, Marti or Chivas.

November 13 2012