Over a year ago, in September 2011, Cuban State Security flamboyantly installed 2 cameras overlooking Antonio Rodiles’ house, the site of Estado de Sats.
From Estado de Sats on Facebook.
Category: Antonio Rodiles
Reasoning with Antonio Rodiles / Reinaldo Escobar
Translator’s note: Our apologies for not having a subtitled version…
As of this afternoon the latest chapter of Citizens’ Reasons will be available, dedicated to discussing a topic that is abstract but essential: Legitimacy. Participating on this occasion are Dagoberto Valdés, Miriam Celaya, Antonio Rodiles and, as moderator, this humble servant who is pleased to announce the program.
Of particular interest is the presence of the animator of the space Estado de Sats — Antonio Rodiles — who was arrested just as we were finishing editing the chapter.
As its title indicates, this edition of Citizens’ Reasons tries to respond to the question of to what extent we citizens should recognize the legitimacy of the “current” Cuban government and what we must do from civil society to achieve our own legitimacy.
The arbitrary arrest of Antonio Rodiles occurred confronting a department of State Security while participating in a civic and peaceful action to inquire about the situation of the attorney Yaremis Flores. There he was brutally beaten, but it was not his attackers who had to answer to the law, but rather the victim, accused of “resisting arrest.” At the time of this writing the courts have not ruled on the matter.
This has been the reality that gives the context to what is discussed in the most recent chapter of Citizens’ Reasons. I recommend that you watch it.
16 November 2012
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The Worst Evil of Bad People is the Silence of Good People / Lilianne Ruiz
Antonio Rodiles continues to be held in the dungeons at Acosta and 10 de Octubre streets, for 9 days now. Perhaps the political police won’t free him before they trial they intend to hold, to avoid the bruises from the beating they gave him becoming public.
Socialist legality is a set of traps to bring down anyone who does not follow the path of the regime. A peaceful protest can be translated by a prosecutor into “disorderly conduct.” Similarly, if a man does not passively allow three State Security officers to beat him — officers in plain clothes who never identified themselves as authority before the blows began to fall — “revolutionary law” translates an action of legitimate self-defense by the victim into “resisting arrest.”
But it was not an arrest which State Security (DSE) agents carried out against Rodiles and a dozen people waiting outside State Security’s Department 21 — after having exhausted other avenues such as calling 106, the police information number — for the authorities to give them information on the whereabouts of Yaremis Flores, who was arrested with similar arbitrariness that same day.
It was an attack and not an arrest that the DSE agents carried out.
They did not communicate to Rodiles who they were, nor that they were going to arrest him. No police officer with a badge and arrest warrant showed up. Simply three men in plain clothes without the mediation of words attacking Rodiles who, according to Revolutionary law, “shouldn’t resist.”
There are too many cases of opponents of the regime who are driven to jail through some legal trap: Darsi Ferrer, Jorge Vázquez Chaviano are just a couple, there are many more.
Rodiles is the leader of Estado de Sats. As Ailer Gonzalez, his partner, explained to me once, the space took the name Estado de Sats from the Anthropology of the Theater, by Eugenio Barba (Odin Theatre). Estado de Sats is the movement of negation that leads to action: to cast the first stone you have to pull back your arm. The action takes place in an organic way. In a country uprooted from its vital centers, to talk and exchange ideas, images — art and thought — is an alternative that the powers-that-be recognize as “dangerous.”
Since last August, just after the arrest of Rodiles during the funeral of the leader of the Christian Liberation Movement Oswaldo Paya, the repressive organs of State Security have tried to block the realization of Estado de Sats in multiple ways. From a siege around the site to block the audience from attending, to the arbitrary arrest of Professor Dimas Castellanos and of the poet and photographer Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.
Rodiles himself went, at the time of those arrests, to State Security’s Section 21 to demand the release of those arrested. In the words of a member the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) who was arrested by this same Department 21 of State Security, the agents told him “Even if Rodiles turned out to be the second coming of Padre de las Casas*, he was going to jail.”
This is how they intend to do it: through traps and sheltered by a “legality” that always protects the State and never the rights of the citizens.
On Wednesday, November 7, when they arrested Rodiles a wave of mass arrests of opponents took place in Havana, with virtually no communication because they cut off the phones of many of the detainees and their families and friends.
Rodiles’ father appeared before the police in a T-shirt bearing a decal for the liberation of his son and this caused a scandal for the authorities.
Faced with the pain of others, we must remember that if we do not share the responsibility of preventing the purposes of those who are creating the human rights crisis in Cuba, the deceptions of these regimes could continue to thrive in the heyday of dictatorships.
There is no State, no Church, no institution, no ideological, political or religious excuse to violate human rights. The extreme left-wing communist States have found a systematic way, protected by their Constitutions, to carry out these violations of human rights which are their only guarantee for perpetuating their own political power.
*Translator’s note: Padre de las Cases was an early hero of Cuban history.
November 16 2012
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Free Antonio Rodiles
Antonio’s parents, seated in chairs, center, surrounded by family and friends.
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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
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Free Antonio Rodiles / Images
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Rodiles, Targeted by the Regime / Luis Felipe Rojas
Two opposite dynamics have had to change their actions in order to prevail: government repression and the peaceful opposition. Everyday Cubans have taken up arms with new technologies, they have supported each other with the scarce glimmers left behind by the inefficient Constitution of the Republic, while the oppressors have had to beat them out on the street without consideration, leaving themselves to be photographed by anonymous citizens and assimilating the political cost before international public opinion.
The recent temporary detentions, beatings and interrogations against a large number of Cuban dissidents have revealed two important aspects between non-conformist citizens and guarantors of the old Stalinist power. The victims protested in front of an important department of the Ministry of the Interior in the Cuban capital. On one hand, it has been proven that the intensity of the beatings against them is the same, while the dissidents have combined the most useful of diffusion tools to spread their message, and their membership has been increasing.
In the scuffle which State Security started this past 10th of November, there was a well-known writer, various lawyers (three of whom were detained and taken to dungeons), a scholar, a blogger known to the entire world, five former political prisoners from the group of the 75 (The Black Spring of 2003), the 2010 Sakharov Award Recipient, various human rights activists, and Antonio G. Rodiles, the director of the independently produced TV show Estado de Sats, which was recently nominated for an Emmy.
In other words, the group of detainees represented a large range of social disagreement happening right now.
Rodiles…the new repressive wave.
At this point in time, many ask themselves why the aggressions against Antonio Rodiles. What did the prudent political police officials find in this restless intellectual? The Citizen Demand for a Another Cuba could have gone by as just another initiative, but the restrictive claws of the high ranks of the Military’s Counter-Intelligence do not want to take any more chances.
The Citizens’ Demand for Another Cuba, which demands that the government ratify the covenants it signed at the UN in 2008 and “immediately put the legal and political guarantees in practice,” in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has gained the support of diverse sectors of the dissidence in Cuba. In this manner, with each passing day more Cubans in and out of the island are supporting it — a detail which rapidly gains support.
Rodiles, a young intellectual, devised a way to report and shed light on the most diverse of thoughts and anti-Castro activism through filmed interviews in his home. The “televised programs” of Estado de Sats are filmed and edited in a beautiful, yet simple, fashion, without any technological gadgets and as soon as they are uploaded onto channels for massive diffusion such as YouTube, they quickly receive much attention throughout the entire national geography.
Yoani Sánchez… stepping it up to another level.
In the video of the arrest this past 7th of November, one can see precious details of the brutal repression, and there are two aspects which should not be forgotten if one wants to know the current Cuban reality. The first is that, once again, an anonymous citizen filmed high-ranking soldiers during an operation. The second factor is that the repressive actions are being accompanied by a face, and in that sense, the blogger Yoani Sanchez carries a fundamental weight.
Known for her brief writings in the most popular blog in the Spanish-speaking world, Yoani has been the protagonist of courses and workshops about the tools of the modern technological world, and of citizen empowerment.
That brief video of an Immigration official, lacking arguments, notifying her that she had no Exit Permit for leaving Cuba, went around the world. Yoani was inaugurating the sessions of cyber-victims, promoting (nearly online) her outrage. Without a doubt, the strategists of the Cuban Intelligence fell in the trap of a haughtiness which they did not need and with which they cast blame on themselves.
The husband of the dissident blogger, journalist Reinaldo Escobar, being pushed by a mass of braggarts with lynching licenses was another episode for which he and Yoani supplied the architecture. Escobar challenged a notable operation and posted himself, like a neighborhood kid on a central street of the capital, to await his ‘opponent’ and this time turned the screw: the accredited media outlets in Havana filmed and projected the images of these government sponsored repressive acts against a defenseless citizen to the world. Once again, Yoani Sanchez was pulling the strings, and moving the chess pieces.
When a well-known independent journalist revealed his ties to the political police, Cuban television let loose its machinery of propaganda and aired a series of documentaries titled “Cuba’s Reasons,” where they exhibited photos, videos, and other testimonies about the Civic Resistance. As a response, the author of Generation Y took it to another level and created an improvised television studio in her house. She started to publish interviews with members of civil society which she put in the series known as “Citizen’s Reasons,” revealing the freshest of faces and thoughts of those confronting the old military dictatorship.
They seem like small skirmishes, but with her actions Yoani Sanchez has received the same amount of praise outside of Cuba as slanders published by former president Fidel Castro, as well as an acceptance among the important actors of the Cuban opposition, acknowledging that she has opened a crack, a path paved by legitimate appropriations of civic tools which have always been there but which the dictatorship has criminalized.
The act of a citizen publishing the face of repression in Cuba from his/her cell phone arms the arguments against the regime’s henchmen. It is not an invention of the famed blogger, but it was she who put it in practice, which consecrates her in the history of the Civic Resistance on the island.
Translated by Raul G.
12 November 2012
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URGENT: Manuel, Antonio Rodiles’ Father, is on Hunger Strike Outside the Acosta Police Station (53)-53233726 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
URGENT, DESPERATE SITUATION IN CUBA: The elderly infirm Manuel Rodiles Planas, father of Antonio G. Rodilies, has just DECLARED HIMSELF ON HUNGER STRIKE outside the Acosta station, accompanied only by Ailer Gonzalez Mena (Art Director and partner of Antonio Rodiles) in the municipality of Diez de Octubre because the authorities refuse to receive or give any response in a timely manner on the legal fate of his son in prison, incommunicado, beaten, and presumed to be on a hunger and thirst strike for 5 days now.
Ailer’s cellphone is (53)-53233726 and needs refills to be able to communicate with friends and family in the world, but it is feared that the state company, CUBACEL, is about to block the number.
PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE THEM ON THEIR OWN. THERE IS ALREADY A STATE SECURITY OPERATION FORMING OUTSIDE THE STATION.
Translator’s note: Here is a place you can go to recharge cellphones for Cuban bloggers:
EZTOP
Orlando’s cellphone has been blocked — for more information you can call him on his landline at: (537)-6988269
November 11 2012
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LIBERTAD! FREEDOM! / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Declaration No. 2, 11 November 2012
On Wednesday, November 7, a group of citizens was arrested outside the so-called Section 21 of State Security, at 31st Avenue and 110th Street, in the municipality of Marianao. The group of about ten people was there to inquire about the legal status and whereabouts of the attorney Yaremis Flores, who was arrested without due process hours earlier.
This was the first of a series of illegal arrests that extended into the next day, when several friends and supporters went to the Acosta Station, between 2nd and 3rd, in the Diez de Octubre municipality, to inquire about the causes of what happened. Other solidarity groups took to the streets in the interior of the country, also victims of arrests and repression. These arrests were accompanies, in the majority of cases, by the cutting off of telephones with the complicity of the companies CUBACEL and ETECSA. Among those arrested were many activists related to the Citizen’s Demand for Another Cuba, which has been developing, in recent months, a campaign which aims to make the Cuban government ratify the International Covenants on Human Rights that Cuba signed in 2008.
Today, 72 hours after the violent arrest of Antonio Rodiles, principal coordinator of the Estado de Sats project, and 48 hours after the equally violent detention of the writer Angel Santiesteban, both remain behind bars, on hunger strike, without seeing the sun, without their right to make the telephone call as required, and without communications with their closest family members. We assume that the main reason of the delay in their releases is to hide any traces of the severe beatings to which they were subjected at the time of their imprisonment. So far, it is unknown precisely what the situation is with regards to their physical condition, and the future evolution of both intellectuals.
Police harassment, arbitrary arrests for political reasons, the abuse, and the imputation of crimes not committed, are procedures that are completely outside the law and that were being reported recently by the lawyers Yaremis Flores and Laritza Diversent (CubaLex agency), to the Office of
High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, in a detailed register of persons who are at risk. Governance in Cuba has become pure repressive praxis, far beyond any supposed ideological sign.
We hold Cuban State Security responsible for their actions with regards to the life and health of Antonio Rodiles, Angel Santiesteban, and any other detainee whose arrest we do now yet know of. The national police should refrain from carrying out arbitrary directions and illegal orders and psychological pressure as ordered by State Security. It should ensure the strict compliance with the laws, the rights of citizens and safety, by the State and not by a government whose legitimacy has expired, for the Cuban nation and not for the so-called Revolution.
We demand the immediate release without charges of Antonio Rodiles and Ángel Santiesteban. We demand the purging of responsibilities between the paramilitary and the officials involved in these events outside the laws of our country.
This is the legitimate claim of a civil society that is not restrained by any coercion nor driven by violence on the part of power and that does not relinquish even one of the spaces we have gained.
We thank the international community for the sensitivity it demonstrates toward our struggle. We urge all Cubans, wherever they are, to continue in solidarity with the aspirations of justice and freedom in our society at this definitive historical juncture.
Havana, November 11, 2012
Boris González Arenas
Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Lia Villares
Luis Trápaga
Alfredo Fernández Rodríguez
Ailer González Mena
Camilo Ernesto Olivera
David Canela
Walfrido López R.
Claudio Enrique Fuentes Madan
November 11 2012
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Phone Recharge Needed Urgently for Ailer, Antonio Rodiles’ partner, to coordinate a protest for his release: (53)-53233726 / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
URGENT, please, Antonio G. Rodiles’ partner, the activist of Estado de Sats and Cine a Toda Costa (Cinema at Any Cost), Ailer Gonzalez Mena, needs someone to immediately recharge her mobile phone because she is in the street talking and coordinating actions for the campaign to release Rodiles.
Her number is: (53)-53233726.
Translator’s note: Here is a place you can go to recharge it:
EZTOP
Orlando’s cellphone has been blocked — for more information you can call him on his landline at: (537)-6988269
November 10 2012
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ON HUNGER AND THRIST STRIKE: Antonio Rodiles, Claudio Fuentes and Angel Santiesteban / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
The photographer Claudio Fuentes Madan and Estado de Sats activist, Antonio G. Rodiles, since their violent and arbitrary arrests days ago, are on a HUNGER AND THIRST in protest and resistance against the political police and the murderers of our citizens.
Both continue to be INCOMMUNICADO or MISSING in the Castro prisons of the municipality of 10 de Octubre, in Lawton (at Acosta and Aguilera streets), because no one believes the words of their captors.
The are both very weakened and affected by low temperatures and poor prison conditions. Rodiles is suffering facial injuries from the beating given to him by the repressor called Camilo and others, including knocking him to the floor and punching and kicking him.
The novelist Angel Santiesteban-Prats has broken ribs and a cracked skull from the beating that was captured on a video shot by @ HablemosPress.
There are reports that in Santiago de las Vegas, prisoners are also on a hunger and thirst strike.
November 10 2012
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Sunday, September 2, at 5 pm in SATS: Literature of Liberty: With Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and the winners of the Cuban New Thought Contest / Estado de Sats, For Another Cuba
Today Sunday, Sept. 2, at 5 pm in SATS
Literature in Liberty:
With Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Cuban New Thought contest winners
(e-Maro, Frank Correa, Orlando Freire Santana, Dimas Castellanos)
Ave 1ra %46 y 60 #4606. Miramar, Playa. La Habana.
This meeting is rescheduled as we could not hold it yesterday, Saturday, September 1st at 7:00 pm because of the arrest to Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo.
OLPL’s message of liberation:
We will continue meeting as Estado de Sats, neither threats, nor arrests, nor repudiation rallies nor police operations will stop us.
We are free citizens and we want another Cuba, there is not brute force that can beat that!
SATS Update:
It is now 4:20 pm and a large police operation is deployed around the headquarters of Estado de Sats.
Yoani Sánchez complaints from Twitter (@ yoanisanchez):
#Cuba this “fateful weekend” does not end. The graffiti artist El Sexto just sent me a text saying “I am a prisoner” :-(
#Cuba Also arrested were Luis Eligio de @ OmniZonaFranca and his girlfriend Kizzy
2 September 2012
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Cuban Government’s Repression Against UNPACU / Estado de Sats, Felix Navarro, Librado Linares, Antonio G. Rodiles
A few days ago a document signed by the coordinators of the Campaign For Another Cuba warned of the growing repression by the Cuban government against Civil Society and the possible consequences of these actions for our country.
At this time in Eastern Cuba, the activists of the Cuban Patriotic Union (UNPACU) are repressed and violated and have been assaulted at the home of José Daniel Ferrer, the Union’s coordinator.
We alert the international community to this escalation of repression by the Cuban government against Civil Society and hold them responsible for encouraging future violent episodes against the citizenry in our country.
A few days ago warned in a document signed by coordinator of the Campaign for Another Cuba on the Cuban government’s increasing repression against civil society and the consequences of these actions for our country.
– Felix Navarro, Librado Linares and Antonio G. Rodiles, State of SATS.
List of detained activists:
Jose Daniel Ferrer García
Anger Antonio Blanco
Jorge Cervantes García
Franklin Pelegrino
Samuel Leblán
Arcelio Rafael Molina
Yohandris Veranes Hernández
Ovidio Martín
Miguel Rafael Cabrera
Guillermo Coba Reyes
Rolando Humberto González
Edel Ruiz
Guillermo Fariñas
23 August 2012
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For Another Cuba: Press Release in Response to Arrest of Activists / For Another Cuba
Our Position: Félix Navarro, José Daniel Ferrer, Librado Linares, Antonio G. Rodiles, Wilfredo Vallín
Havana, August 16, 2012
TO NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC OPINION
Yesterday, August 15 of this year, while handing out the Citizen Demand for Another Cuba in a central area of the Marianao neighborhood in Havana, Cuba, three citizens were arrested and taken to the 6th Station of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR).
On receiving news of this arrest, we the undersigned presented ourselves at the Station to learn the details of the case and whether there were any charges against those detained. After having spoken with the people who appeared responsible, it seemed critical to us that we make the following statement to establish, for the future, our position with regards to this complex problem.
Our response is based on the Constitutional provision established in Article 63:
“Every citizen has the right to direct complaints and petitions to the authorities and to receive the appropriate attention or responses, in a reasonable time, in accordance with the law.”
Protected by this provision in the nation’s Constitution, we went to the National Assembly of People’s Power and delivered this document in order, first and foremost, to inform the government of the country about it, so that it cannot, now, suggest that we are acting behind its back, nor without its knowledge.
If what is said in Article 63 is, in fact, true and is honored in today’s Cuba, then we are acting in accordance with the Law, a right that must be respected by the military authorities as well.
By arresting and beating citizens who call for the ratification of the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, these authorities are not only violating a right recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by the Constitutional Law governing its own citizens, but also appear to be ignoring that the government itself signed these documents on behalf of the people of Cuba, on February 28, 2008 in New York City.
Signing Human Rights Covenants is a Sovereign Act, is the title that headlined an article in the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) on that date. But at the same time, Article 3 of our Constitution reads:
“In the Republic of Cuba sovereignty resides in the people, from who originates all the power of the State. This power is exercised directly…”
Our real and only intention is to allow the people of Cuba to truly, peacefully, and in a civilized manner, express their opinions about a problem as vital as their present way of life, their hopelessness about the future, and their ability to suggest real paths of change that would improve their precarious existence.
In contrast, the position of the authorities has been to create a climate of conflict with civil society, to provoke altercations in the public order with its acts of repudiation, its beating of opponents, men and women, including the Ladies in White, and ultimately its insinuation that the intention of the dissidence is to “provoke situations that encourage a military intervention in the country.”
While buildings collapse on the bodies of our compatriots, to simply dust them off a little with no visible prospects of a solution, and this after decades of other equally difficult problems, to remain silent in complicity after 54 years of setbacks, is a civic and moral cowardice that many of us are no longer able to bear.
We Cubans who call on the rest of our compatriots will act responsibly, without questioning or resisting the actions of the police or State Security, at least in the public street, even when a disproportionate operation using unjustified violence is exercised shortly after the latest one, as documented during the funeral of the known opponent, Payá Sardiñas.
If there are violations of the law they are not committed by us, but by the repressors who think that they can resolve all the problems of Cuba, without paying any attention to recent historic experience, with contempt for the citizens expressed in arrogance and brute force. This could lead ALL OF US down a path with no return.
In addition, we are informing our brothers within and outside of Cuba, as well as the international community, about what is happening here in order to establish responsibility for what might happen in the future.
The Cuban Nation, fortunately, has had its illustrious sons and great patricians. One of them left us with this: “To beg for rights is the domain of cowards incapable of exercising them.” Another great among the greats, closer in time, told us, “I do not seek danger, but neither do I run from it. I simply try to do my duty.”
Standing on these principles, we will reclaim our rights and we will do our duty.
Félix Navarro, José Daniel Ferrer, Librado Linares, Antonio G. Rodiles, Wilfredo Vallín
With copies to:
– All the activists of the Campaign
– The National Assembly of People’s Power
– Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United Nations
16 August 2012
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Estado de Sats in Troubled Waters / Anddy Sierra Alvarez
A Security of State operation carried out in cooperation with the National Revolutionary Police (PNR), blocked participants from attending Estado de Sats this Friday, August 10, 2012; but those in charge of the Cinema at All Costs didn’t cancel the projection of the documentary “Knockout” planned for this day. Around 30 people participated.
The Estado de Sats projects was sabotaged by Cuban State Security in the afternoon. Starting at 6:45 pm the participants began to arrive, but not all of them could reach Antonio Rodiles’ house, several were arrested, others on seeing the wave of police decided to return home.
Antonio Rodiles and Ailer Gonzales worried about the low attendance, the comments of those fortunate to arrive on time — 7:10 pm — suspected they were letting people pass who were: bloggers, writers, independent journalists, lawyers, etc. They went out to verify their suspicions and were right.
Antonio Rodiles commented that he had heard about a possible act of repudiation planned for in front of his house, through a friend, and had to go to the 5th police station, at 7th A and 62nd in Miramar where he delivered a document to the 2nd Station Chief, badge number 0037, warning of possible consequences of such acts and provocations.
The projection of the documentary took place, it was made by Dr. Darsi Ferrer, and was about 11 champion boxers, a sport that has brought much glory to the country (Cuba), all of them athletes with one great dream, to participate in the professional boxing league, but time passed and they retired from the active sport and their dream vanished.
Currently these champion athletes fight to live well, against unemployment, the little attention paid to them by the government and many of them lose themselves in alcohol to forget.
Agustín López (Blogger) says, “This documentary reminds me of the Roman circus, where the athletes (gladiators) fought to entertain the people and the leaders. The profits were divided between the personalities in power.”
The activities ended at 10:00 pm and there were still some police circling the area; of those fortunate in having seen the documentary none were arrested.
August 13 2012