The Writer Felix Sánchez Resigns from UNEAC / Francis Sánchez

My brother, the writer Felix Sánchez has decided to go public with his resignation from UNEAC (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba), which he submitted in early November last year. Everything indicates that it became effective, although no one will contact him. In an email circulated recently, he said: “To whom it may concern: In the final days of 2010 I gave the president of the Ciego de Avila UNEAC the document attached. Given what has happened between the November 4 and today, I decided to make this known to other people, especially members of UNEAC, cultural institutions and colleagues with whom I share concerns and dreams. Greetings, Felix Sanchez.”

Ciego de Avila, 4 November 2010

To: President of the Provincial UNEAC Committee, Ciego de Avila

Esteemed comrade:

The reason I am presenting this is to ask that the Provincial Committee, by my own request, remove me from the membership of UNEAC as quickly as possible.

This has not been a rash decision, nor part of a grievance or a particular event. It is the result of a long meditation on the role of UNEAC in our society, its function, its consistency with what I consider should be the role of an organization of artists in vanguard of creating and thinking, its commitment at any cost to the truth, and with the ancestral values of our identity, cultivated by an intelligentsia that made us proud with its attitude of fighting everything that did not have the people at the center of its concerns, that did not recognize that the people are the highest authority and the measure of legitimacy of any dream, plan and result.

In recent years I have waited to see UNEAC assume this civic, cultural and political responsibility. But I exhausted my willingness to wait, and I believe it is dishonest to continue to belong, for advantages of any kind, to an organization which which I now disagree in more than one essential way.

Please undertake the steps involved in this process and keep me informed of their progress.

For a Cuba that is authentically socialist!
With the highest consideration,

Félix Rodríguez Sánchez

Ciego de Avila, November 4, 2010

February 2 2011