Waking up in a Dictatorship / Angel Santiesteban

From the time I was a kid I discovered that my feelings forced me to show solidarity with the weakest. In sports I wanted to play on the most competitive teams, and today it’s the same. But I’ve always been on the side against the Cuban dictatorship.

In the eighties, when my generation started thinking, we hated the dictatorships in the world, especially those in Latin American; at that time we didn’t understand that Cuba lived under a totalitarian regime.

I still don’t know where my need to express my feelings without worrying about the consequences came from, even if the price is my own life.

The Cuban opposition, if I were asked to express it through a painting, would be a huge tree in a gale of wind raging against its structure, and despite its trunk, sometimes it leans, seeming as if it could touch the ground, and even so, it endures all things, at times the wind carrying away its branches, leaves, fruits, but always, irremediably always, it recovers, and stands to wait and face the next onslaught.

The time remaining without freedom is impossible to predict, but the forces of resistance seem to be sufficient and are multiplying.

Ángel Santiesteban-Prats

Prison settlement of Lawton. March 2014.

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